Mount Rushmore just doesn’t work for me. Perhaps in person it would be impressive, but from pictures I’ve seen, it is a failure. Lincoln is awkwardly placed apart from the others. Jefferson looks nothing like Jefferson. Washington has lapels, while the others don’t even get necks. Half of Roosevelt’s face is shrouded in shadow. The right (to the viewer) side of Lincoln’s head seems unfinished. I could go on.
I do not mean to denigrate the efforts of Gutzon Borglum and all those who worked on creating Mount Rushmore. I know that due to funding running out, the intended monument was never finished. And it still is a pretty impressive engineering feat, but it just doesn’t hack it as a work of art.
As art, no, Count Rushmore’s eponymous mountain is no great shakes.
But if you’re in the right area of the country, Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Wall Drug and Badlands National Park make a pretty fun long-weekend road trip. It’s not an “Oh my god, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen” kind of thing, i.e., it’s not the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China or anything like that, but it’s fun to see and it is fairly impressive in person.
Seeing it in person made it 1000% cooler to me. It’s big. FUCKING big. The sheer size of it, and the ability of the workers to carve it proportionately without blowing a nose off, is impressive.
As art? Naaaah, it’s not much. But as a man-made marvel, it’s pretty noteworthy.
Been there. The heads are pretty far from the public vantage point and it is fairly obvious that even if Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint had managed to avoid Martin Landau, they just would’ve plunged hundreds of feet to their deaths anyway.
Agreed. But that is neither here nor there. I wasn’t making a statement about the inherent problems of the mountain that the monument was carved from. Only that it is a monumental (he he) failure as a work of art.
Mount Rushmore is worthwhile as only about a 1-2 hour stop in a several day excursion to the Black Hills. Unless you’re really into it.
The only way you can extend the “Mount Rushmore Experience” is to drive down my very favorite road in the entire world, 16A, Iron Mountain Road. Driving south from Mt. Rushmore, look backwards as you drive through each of the tunnels. You’ll see Rushmore neatly framed. Then stop at the scenic overlook, where you can blot out Rushmore with your thumb, and get a sense of the whole thing, including the visitor center. I have a photo from there on my facebook page, but I won’t open link here.
Crazy Horse Monument, Needles, Harney Peak, the Custer State Park Wildlife Loop, Deadwood, the shops of Hill City and Keystone… I spend far more time in those places.
It works more as a monument than as a work of art. It is also very cool to have something like that in the West for people who live thousands of miles from places like Washington, DC, or the Statue of Liberty.
I also enjoyed it more as an adult, especially with the new visitor’s center, the trails which give you a much closer look than traditionally available, and the evening flag ceremony.
I love the Black Hills and the Badlands. Definitely a place worth visiting.
I’ve been there twice, and while I wouldn’t say you can spend hours staring at the thing, it’s an incredible achievement that’s well worth appreciating in all its enormity. And the Black Hills area has tons of stuff to do around it.
I also agree with Markxxx about the Badlands. Two miles in, and you’ve seen what there is to see, but the park has another thirty miles of the same to look at.
<nitpick> enormity isn’t appropriate as the noun form of enormous. It really means heinousness or appallingness. For enormous, we’re pretty much stuck with enormousness.
</nitpick>
Hey, no one ever said Enlish had to be logical.
