We got up early and I headed over to Jewel Cave to purchase tour tickets as we heard they sell out very early and only sell them the day of the tour. I picked a tour time of 4 pm so we would have plenty of time for the rest of the day’s activities.
I got back and we headed off to Mt. Rushmore. It was a short half-hour ride over and surprisingly they have parking garages. Shade!! The pups weren’t allowed too close. I guess they are worried they might pee on the granite. It was an awe inspiring place. Hard to imagine guys on wooden ladders with pneumatic tools did that. I have always wanted to see it in person. They are huge!
On the way there from Custer, you can see the beginnings of the Crazy Horse sculpture off the 185 highway. It’s going to also be massive but only the face is close to finished.
There is no entrance fee at Mt. Rushmore, but there is a $10 parking fee, and as I said, the parking garages are awesome on a warm day in the Dakota’s.
We stayed there about an hour, it was a bit too warm to hike the mountain and there isn’t anything else to see there… just the chatchski shop and some food joint.
From there we headed out to find Iron Mountain Road. I read about it and a tunnel carved into the rock that had a great view of the dead presidents’ heads. And they were right. What an awesome view it was. And one of the windiest roads I think I have ever been on. (and me a brain dead motorcyclist) Turns our there were three square tunnels blasted out of the granite, and two of them lined up directly 
with the monument. They had even cut down the trees in a straight line so they would be visible. What a great road. There were also a lot of wooden bridges that were shaped in like a spiral staircase so you curved around and went under where you just were. Thank god we weren’t in an RV for this road.
After all that fun we headed back to the coach to eat some lunch and change clothes for the tour. I neglected to tell Kathy there were 750 stairs on this tour. It was awesome! Although climbing all those stairs to get back up to the elevator was a real bear. Thankfully it was 49 degrees down there so we weren’t sweating as much. It was very different than Wind Cave. I had a lot of fun, but I think Kathy is done with caves for a while.
We leave Tuesday morning for the Badlands, staying across the street from Wall Drug.
