16.jul.19 - Sturgis - Mount Rushmore, South Dakota

Sturgis is a short distance from Deadwood, South Dakota. A motorcycle rally, a kind of celebration of the whole lifestyle will be taking place in early August and they are getting ready. Looks like a Party Hearty kind of affair.

I also stopped at the Buffalo Chip RV Park which is a few miles outside of town and apparently has some sort of reputation of its own. I was told I might be able to register the RV through them but that was not the case.

Did some RV registration research at the Treasurer's Office, shopped and ate breakfast at Lynn's Dakotamart, all in all a small rural town (6-7000 pop.) getting ready for one heck of a party. But not really my cup of tea, not my lifestyle, from the looks of things not much tea is going to be consumed there, I asked the girl at the Buffalo Chip bar - I was the only one in the place - if she had any coffee, she was real nice about it but, no, nothing like that there...portable toilets out back.

Since its all about the rally, I can't really say I was at Sturgis. 

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Mount Rushmore

A must see kind of monument, since "North by Northwest" (1959), recently reinforced by the "National Treasure  Book of Secrets" movie, but the Hitchcock film has been a part of me for 60 years.

This image focus is on Ted Roosevelt, I lived/worked in Oyster Bay, Long Island, NY for about 2 years, near his home at Sagamore Hill and I many times visited the nearby bird sanctuary which I believe was his doing and his fairly modest gravesite. He ranched in Medora, North Dakota for a few years, about 260 miles due North of Mount Rushmore.

An important thing to know is that the monument opens up at 5 AM, there is no parking fee till 8 AM, and early in the morning it may be just you and the fearsome foursome here and the early morning sun - some great light for a picture. It was probably about 6 when I got there this morning.

By 7 or so, most of the people take a whole bunch of pictures and seem never really to look at the faces and what they symbolize. Life as a collection of selfies.

Further down the road some mountain goats were seen behind the monument, here's one, hard to see - strange looking critter, probably thinks the same of me.

Finally a picture of the stream behind my RV at the Magnusson Hotel in Keystone. The fella on the left is fly fishing, on the right he's panning for gold which is how all the trouble started back about 1876.