Well, the inclement weather never materialized, which I suppose is a good thing – though after spending the night in a hotel room in order to avoid it, the lack of bad weather was a let-down. After an 8am continental breakfast, we hit the road, picked up Kevin’s car and headed for Mt. Rushmore.

After a fiasco I had paying for parking (Traveler’s Note: Parking at Mt. Rushmore is $10 and they only take cash.), Kevin and I spent about an hour and a half at Rushmore. To be honest, yeah, they’re pretty huge faces and it’s a wonder of engineering to have them sculpted into the rock, but… well, as Kevin and I had discussed since getting to South Dakota, there are only two things in the state… National Parks and tourist traps. To be frank, I think we both got more excited by the mountain goat we saw than by the mountain.

Back into the cars for the drive over to Jewel Cave and since we had a few hours to kill before we could take our tour (Traveler’s Note: None of the tours are free, even if you hold the annual pass to get you into all the Natl. Parks.), the Scenic Tour, we fired up the camp stove for some lunch, dried out our tent from the thunderstorm our last night/morning in the Badlands and got harangued by an elderly ranger for eating ramen noodles.

I would highly recommend this tour to anyone passing through the area. It’s about half a mile long and mostly steps, but the cave is phenomenal and well worth the exertion. The path is paved and the stairs are metal, so don’t fear that you’ll be crawling around in the cave. The tours lasts about an hour and a half and you’ll learn quite a bit.

After finishing up the tour, we headed to Wind Cave National Park to get our backcountry camping permit (free camping is the way to travel!), hiked in, set up our tent (so we didn’t have to do it in the dark) and headed back to Mount Rushmore for the lighting ceremony. Again, we left unimpressed by the program (the ranger giving the introductory speech to a video basically repeated, word for word, the first 5 minutes of the video). I should have some decent pictures of Rushmore lit at night though.

A final trip back to Wind Cave and a rather arduous hike into the backcountry and over the top of a steep hill later, we were in bed.

Travel Distance: 165 miles