It may be too late in the year for a family trip to the great national parks, but it’s never too early for planning next year’s vacation to parks and monuments like Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Mount Rushmore is the famous – and enormous – sculpture carved into the Black Hills of western South Dakota, featuring the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
Sculpted by the father-son team of Gutzon Borglum and Lincoln Borglum, work began in 1927. The presidents’ faces were completed between 1934 and 1939. The original plan was to continue until each was sculpted down to his waist, but World War II and budget considerations ended the project in 1941. (Trivia: Jefferson was originally supposed to be on the other side of Washington. But after they started carving our third president they found the rock wasn’t suitable – and blew him up.)
The 1,278 acres of Mount Rushmore National Memorial are maintained by the National Park Service. In addition to the sculpture, there’s a visitors center, museum, amphitheater and “Presidential Trail” – a walkway that takes visitors closer to the base of the mountain. There are no entrance fees but the parking is handled by an independent foundation which charges a fee to offset the cost of building and maintaining the parking.
There are 3 million visitors each year, so it’s not hard to find places to stay near Mount Rushmore. There are hotels and inns in the nearby small towns of Keystone and Hill City. The nearest city of moderate size is Rapid City, South Dakota, about 25 miles northeast of Mount Rushmore.
TheRealPlaces.com has guides for finding hotels near other national parks in the western United States, including Badlands National Park.
