56.6 miles cycling, 4057′ of climbing (2123.8 tot) – to read from the beginning, click here.
Today was memorials day. We got up early and packed up camp and headed to the Conoco or coffee and eight ate our breakfast beside the gas station to save the coffee-making and cleanup time. We then headed for Crazy Horse memorial. On the Mickelson trail it was uphill the whole way. Just a gradual grade. We paid our 10 bucks to get into the memorial only to find that basically gets you into the museum. If you do want to get anywhere close to the memorial you pay $5 for a bus ride to the base of the mountain or $125 for a trip up to the arm in front of the face. I get the need to raise money to fund the completion and they’ve never taken government money to fund the project. The museum was okay and actually interesting but also kind of disappointing you didn’t get any good views of the mountainside sculpture.
So we hung out there for a while and then headed over to Mount Rushmore. The ride was challenging with a few hefty climbs but nothing “monumental.”
We stashed the bikes beside the restrooms and headed for the monument views and the flag plaza. There was an Abe Lincoln impersonator, Fritz Klein, and Dana and I had a nice chat with him. Turns out he has done his Abe schtick in both State College schools and the Altoona railroaders museum. He was going to give the second inaugural speech of Abraham Lincoln that afternoon, an event we told him we’d definitely make.
We left Abe to do the Presidential Trail. I was sad to learn that you can no longer climb up to the tops of the heads like I did in 2005 when I was here. That ended in 2019 — problems with wear and tear and erosion I guess. We got a lot of views of the memorial on that little walk, and finished up just in time to hear Abe’s speech. A very good rendition which I’ll include parts of as a video below.
On the plaza we met Adam and his heavy gravel touring bike. He was a captain of yachts for the rich and taking time off to do this trip. We thought our bikes were heavy but his is probably 125 lbs with all the gear he’s carrying.
We wrapped up around 4 PM and started our last leg of this day to Rapid City. After 2 weeks of camping, I was insisting on a hotel night (Sometimes you just want a bed). We took the back way to Rapid starting with a great descent into Keystone. After that, there wasn’t much descending and a lot of climbing. It was a rough 27 miles to our hotel on the north side of the city and after burritos as big as our head at a local restaurant, we crashed in prep for the ride to Wall tomorrow.
