Rockies and Great Plains roadtrip, 2015 part 6: Mt Rushmore to Denver

THURSDAY JULY 30, 2015

TL;DR - See Mt Rushmore and then drive south through Nebraska to catch a flight in Denver.

Theme songs:

• "Mountain Town" (South Park)
• "Get Out of Denver" (Bob Seger)

Weather: sunny all day
Having missed the night light show at Mt Rushmore, I got there a little after 8, when the visitor center opened. The park actually opens at 5am but that's way too early. I planned to spend a couple hours there and then hit the open road going south to Denver. It's about 400 miles and 6.5 hours, but by dropping off my car in Denver I save nearly $400 on car rental and air fare to Chicago. It was worth it to me. And on the way I'd pick up my 7th new state of the trip (UT, ID, WY, MT, ND, SD, NE) and my 47th overall - just need Alaska, Minnesota, and Iowa. Not much along the way, but a stop for lunch somewhere, hit the SD/Nebraska border around 2pm, then the Nebraska/Colorado border around 5:15pm. Plenty of time to make a 9:15pm flight.

The guidebooks say Mt Rushmore will take about 3 hours; I saw what I needed and wanted to in 2, partially because it was early in the morning well before the crowds came in on buses. There's no admittance fee to get in to the park, but there's a $10 parking fee that's actually good for 1 year. After walking down the Avenue of Flags, I went to the visitor's center and got the lowdown on the park and the sculpture. The 0.6 mile Presidential Trail goes around the base, and you get a pretty close up view of each of the four heads along the way. At the end is the Sculptor's Studio, where you can see the original models for what became the final structure. If you don't want to do any of it, you can still get a pretty good look from the highway as you pass by.


Overheard: a mom telling her kids, "Stop whining, someday you're going to thank me for taking you to all these places." It's true!

A few miles down the road from Mt Rushmore is the Crazy Horse Memorial, stay on SR 244 til it turns into US 385, and it'll be on your left going south. I was told that it wasn't anything spectacular and that I didn't really need to stop off there, but I also found that if you turn into the driveway to go up the road, you can't turn around and you have to pay the admission charge. So instead I just backed up my car on the side of the road (with a couple of others) and got back on the highway.

I had been looking through the Roadside America website before the trip, to see what kind of weird, strange, and off-the-beaten-path sights might be available. One of the ones I stopped at, just south of Crazy Horse, was a Flintstones Bedrock City theme park. The houses and buildings looked just like they did in the cartoon. It was worth a few minutes to stop and look.

Picked up a sandwich in Hot Springs, then made my way south on US 385 into Nebraska at 2pm, and through the "panhandle" of Nebraska, which must be the flat and boring part, to the Colorado border at 5:15pm.

I took I-76 into Denver from the east. I could have taken I-80 west to Cheyenne and then I-25 south into Denver, but there wasn't really a good reason to do so. Thought about getting dinner at a restaurant on the way to the airport, but didn't want to take the chance that it would take too long so I ended up having dinner in the airport - with a friend from work who coincidentally was in the airport to take a flight back to Houston. Made it to Chicago, and thus ends the Rockies and Great Plains roadtrip.