Take A Roller Coaster Road To See the Many Faces of Mount Rushmore
Driving across the country from Toronto to Vancouver, we planned a few stops along the way. On the first half of our trip through the midwest U.S., we were excited to detour to see Mount Rushmore.
While it is easy to get to Mount Rushmore directly from I90, after looking at route options we decided to take the much more scenic back route along part of the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway – Hwy 79 to Route 36 and then along Iron Mountain Road.
Iron Mountain Road was a wild twisting road with several hairpin turns.
While we had to drive carefully with both eyes on the road, we got excited when we saw the sign warning of buffalo. Despite searching the fields and valleys, no buffalo would be seen on this trip. But we could begin to see Mount Rushmore far off in the distance when we rounded the curves.
There were several single lane bridges, two of which framed a view off in the distance of Mt Rushmore. Be careful if you are trying to frame your picture through the bridge as cars and motorcycles speed up from both directions.
Pig tail turns on the twisty turn took you a full 360 degrees around and through more single lane bridges.
It was a fun ride to get us to the Mount Rushmore official site with several stops at viewpoints to see the faces from different angles.
There has been a lot of things in the paper about the increasing use of drones around national monuments and we found signs prohibiting their use at this site. I guess we will have to keep our drone in the parks of Vancouver.
While we followed the road to the Crazy Horse monument, by the time we got there we were way past our lunch stop to do what was recommended as a 90 minute stop. So we grabbed a quick snapshot and headed to Custer for lunch and continuing on to Buffalo, WY for the stop this night.
We enjoyed our half day detour to see Mount Rushmore and to drive by the Crazy Horse Monument. If you really want to explore the monuments and the great parks in the area, plan to spend a few days.
Have you visited Mount Rushmore? Were you fascinated by the many faces of Mount Rushmore? Did you take the same scenic drive in as we did?
Do you need to pay to see Mount Rushmore or can you see it enough from different places on the road?
Heather
You do not pay to see the monument but you will pay $11 to park. This gets you an annual pass. There is a separate parking fee at Crazy Horse. All of the pictures on the blog were taken at pullout spots coming in from the south end so you get lots of viewpoints without paying. But if you want to get up very close, you would need to park and pay. Hope that helps! Linda