USA - Devilish Things

July 25-26

Hello everyone!

This is a blog about things that sound bad but are actually very cool. Well, one of them would be incredibly bad if it were still working…

Devil's Tower

Missile at the Delta-09 Minuteman missile site 

Badlands National Park

Having been to the United States of America’s first national park (Yellowstone) and then driven through its first national forest (the nearby Shoshone), it seems logical that we would stop at the country’s first national monument if the chance arose. Below is that monument: Devil’s Tower.

It was made a monument in 1906 by President Roosevelt

The tower is 264 metres (867 feet) tall

We weren’t actually planning to go there. Plan A was to visit the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn that I have mentioned in previous posts. However, this area is being renovated and only open on certain days of the week. Those days didn’t match, therefore we went for plan B.

Definitely not where Battle of Little Bighorn happened

Eastern part of Wyoming

I’m very happy we did. It isn’t human-made, which I would associate with a monument; rather, it was made by our planet’s interior about 50 million years ago. Magma was injected into layers of sedimentary rock, which formed a tower…beneath the earth’s surface. Over time, erosion around it has exposed it in the way that we see it today. Mind-boggling.

The excavation was done by ancient rivers

The scientific name for it is a laccolith

There is another theory, offered by Native American tribes. Their sacred stories tell of a tower growing tall to help people escape bears. One in particular says that some girls were playing in a forest when they heard a bear. It was too far to run home, so they climbed a mound and asked a god for help. The tower rose, the bear became angry and tried to climb, but slid down to the bottom. 

Imagine escaping a bear up this...

There are no longer bears in this region - no need for spray!

When doing this, the claws scratched down the tower (forming the column-like structure) and rocks landed on the bear (creating a fun rock field at the bottom that I would have liked to spend more time exploring).

The columns are often hexagonal, made
over time by cracks from pressure

Beware the bear under there...

When white Americans chanced upon this tower, the locals apparently called it ‘Bear Lodge’. This was mistranslated as ‘Bad Gods’, which is why the name subsequently became the worst of them all: Devil’s Tower.

People leave flags here as reverence

This 300-foot alcove is called The Window

Like the bear, people do try to climb Devil’s Tower. Unlike the bear, they are usually successful. We saw two people ascending. It looks like an incredible challenge but, not for the first time when thinking about Native American culture and history, left me a bit conflicted: if it’s a sacred place for peoples like the Lakota, should people be allowed to clamber all over it? Other countries have banned it, after all.

The youngest ever successful climber was only 6 years old

Something else that should be banned? Firing Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs. Doesn’t stop some countries, admittedly, but most countries that possess this weaponry normally refrain from firing or give significant advance notice if it will pass over someone’s airspace. Possessing the strongest military in the world, the United States of course has these, and has for a long time.

At one time there were 1,000 active Minuteman missiles

Back in the days of the Cold War, there was an arms race between them and the Soviet Union that threatened the planet’s destruction. The US developed a missile called Minuteman and hid them around the country, away from populated areas. What better place than the middle of nowhere in South Dakota…

From the time keys were turned to execute a positive launch command, until the missile left the silo, only took about a minute. Hence the name Minuteman.

That glass cover didn’t exist at the time when these were potentially active. Instead, there was a cement, manhole-style cover that the missile could easily blast through. There would have been a fence - trespassing could, and probably would, have been fatal.

Remotely controlled from underground launch control centers miles away from the silos, it offered a hair trigger launch response.

Once again, this stop wasn’t plan A. We had only passed by here - and a bizarre place called Wall Drug where I had the hangover sandwich of my dreams, pictured below - to go on another, optional adventure. If not enough people had wanted to go, we wouldn’t have made the trip east to visit one final national park. Like Devil’s Tower, not one with a particularly pleasant name: Badlands.

A roast beef sandwich. The blob in the middle?
Mashed potato. The brown goo? Meaty gravy.
I repeat, this is a sandwich.

Badlands became a national park in 1978

It’s not saying it’s a bad place to visit; it’s actually a phenomenal place to come to. Rather, Badlands refers to the fact that it is a land that is very difficult to traverse. 

It comes from the Lakota name ‘mako sica’

The park is 244,000 acres in size

They are still difficult to traverse - people get lost in hiking in Badlands every year. It felt very hot - that wasn’t just the continuing dehydration effects from the night before, either. The lack of water in the area would have made it incredibly difficult for those who lived here.

Easy to get lost...unless you're wearing bright colours...

I found water!

My main feeling here was similar to Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks in Utah: the place was otherworldly. Like so many other incredible features I’ve seen on this trip, they used to be part of a shallow seabed. When that sea disappeared, geology worked its magic over millions of years and created this.

The Badlands are eroding at one inch per year

The oldest rocks are 75 million years old

There have been otherworldly creatures here, certainly those from far before the time of the humans. No dinosaurs as they lived on land, but the visitor’s centre outlines evidence of things such as the titanothere (has no living ancestors) and the hyracodon (a primitive rhino that was more like a pony). Fossils are often discovered at Badlands due to the relatively fast degree of erosion of softer rock.

Titanotheres are likely to have gone extinct due to climate change

Hyracodons had unusually large heads in
comparison with the rest of their bodies

They do live fossil work in the visitor's centre - this
lady was adding glue in advance to stop her tiny
jackhammer from breaking anything valuable

Some animals still reside in the area. This was a chance for us to get a better look at bighorn sheep and prairie dogs, as well as some distant bison.

Male bighorn sheep in the far distance - you can see the
distinctive curled horns. The video below is of females.

These prairie dogs have a black tip on their tail

A lonely bachelor bison in the distance

Another animal had been spotted the day before going to Devil’s Tower. We hadn’t seen it in more likely places such as Yellowstone, but finally a moose or two came out to play…

Moose live in areas that have cold, snowy winters

Only male moose have antlers

Moose are excellent swimmers

Moose shed their antlers every year

What’s in a name? They can certainly give you a subconscious impression in your mind (part of the Las Vegas strip is actually instead in an unincorporated town called Paradise, for example). I imagine it would be ‘bad’ to be stuck in ‘Badlands’, and it was understandable that previous people saw a bit of Lucifer in Devil’s Tower. But they are very cool places to visit.

Sitting under the tower of the devil

Admiring outselves rather than the stunning Badlands

Trying not to go too close to the edge...

Life at Badlands!

Love you all,

Matt

USA - Headstrong

 July 25-26

Hello everyone!

This is mainly a blog about heads. 

Mount Rushmore National Memorial

Crazy Horse Memorial

Those are some very famous, chiselled heads. What you can’t see there is how my head was feeling at Mount Rushmore - and for the rest of that day - after going for drinks the evening before. Apparently I ended up doing shots of fireball whisky with strangers. People were surprised I made the 8am bus.

All of this happened in a new state: South Dakota,
known as...The Mount Rushmore State. Of course.

But you don’t need to know about that. I’ll tell you about Mount Rushmore instead. Four Presidents - Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln - carved high into the side of a mountain in the Black Hills. They were chosen to commemorate the founding, growth, preservation and development of the United States.

Washington for the birth of the country, Jefferson
for its expansion with the Louisiana Purchase

Roosevelt for its development with the Panama Canal,
Lincoln for its preservation during the Civil War

There has never been a President Rushmore. That name, then. Mount Rushmore was named after Charles E. Rushmore, a New York attorney, in the late 1880s. He was in the Black Hills on business when he inquired about the mountain's name. A local guide suggested naming it after him. Ignoring any previous names given to what was the sacred mountain of the Native American Lakota Sioux, Mount Rushmore stuck.

Rocky Mountain goats can sometimes be seen on top of the heads

If the face were a true scale, Washington
would be 465 feet (141 metres) tall

The idea of shoving four presidents into a rock face (it was supposed to be more than just their faces at its inception) came in 1923, from a state historian called Doane Robinson. The idea was simple and blunt: tourism. Again, completely ignoring any claims from the Lakota Sioux. The actual design started two years later, with the sculptor being a man called Gutzon Borglum. 

When walking towards the mountain,
you pass the flag of each state

Over time, cracks have appeared that need maintenance

Borglum first sculpted models in his studio, with one inch equalling one foot on the mountain. He then used a complex method to measure on the mountain, which allowed him to know how much stone to remove. Dynamite took away 900 million pounds of rock, allowing the team to then chisel away at the facial features. 

90% of the rock was removed using dynamite

Behind Lincoln's head, there is a real-life secret vault called the
Hall of Records, which features historical essays, pictures and documents

Over $1 million later (that’s a lot by today’s value) and 14 years later, the faces were complete. They did a pretty good job.

2 to 3 million people visit every year

I would have appreciated it more - and
taken more varied pictures - if I felt 100%

There have, of course, been more than just four Presidents of the United States of America. 47 at the current count. 45 of them are immortalised on the main street corners in nearby Rapid City. They don’t create a statue of them until the person can no longer be president, owing to death or completing two full terms, meaning that Biden and Trump don’t have statues yet. 

Relatively ancient: Martin Van Buren

Modern: the statue of George HW Bush

Rapid City was a cute little place. Not that little, actually, with 75,000 residents, but it had a charm to its main streets. It also had bars and, a short Uber ride away, a karaoke joint. But we’re not talking about that. It hurts to remember the size of those fireball whisky shots. Extreme freepouring.

This is Rapid City's oldest brewery,
located in a former fire house

We were confused as to why this
president had a Burger King hat

There is another large head in this area. It belongs to someone who would have been furious at the concept of Mount Rushmore: the one known as Crazy Horse. 

As you can see, it is a work in progress

There is one day a year where they allow people
to hike up to the upper echelons of the structure

Like Buffalo Bill, this was a name which I was aware of without really knowing why. Heading to the Crazy Horse Memorial - crucially the afternoon before fireball-gate - helped me get a better understanding. 

Crazy Horse belonged to the
Lakota, one of three Sioux tribes

His original name was Curly - I think
'Crazy' works better for a warrior!

After the white Americans found gold in the Black Hills, they broke the treaty they signed with many Native American tribes a few years earlier in 1868. That treaty helped to define boundaries for the Sioux reservation. Furious, they and some other tribes attacked US government forces at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. It was a resounding victory for Native American forces, who had been led in part by…Crazy Horse.

This map shows the Great Plains, where many
Native American tribes lived nomadic lives

This picture, from the Buffalo Bill Museum
in Cody, depicts the Battle of Little Bighorn

The man, who never even contemplated signing a treaty with the white man, was a hero. He was actually killed only one year later, stabbed in the back - metaphorically and literally - by a government soldier whilst standing under a flag of truce, at which people were supposed to be seen as safe.

These are artefacts from the Little Bighorn battlefield

No one knows where Crazy Horse is buried -
one theory is underneath this tree in Nebraska

There are a few interesting things about this memorial. Firstly, it’s not finished, and will take another 25 to 30 years to finish. It also refuses to take any government money, in part because they don’t want that to be used as a possible means of washing away the misdemeanours of the past. It has been run by the Ziolkowski family since the beginning of the project in 1948.

These pictures chart the progress - the head
was revealed on the 50th anniversary, in 1998

This is from the road, quite far from the memorial
itself, so you can appreciate the size

This is the world’s largest sculpture in progress, and some of the facts about its size are incredible. All four heads at Mount Rushmore would fit into the head of Crazy Horse, which admittedly goes back quite far. The nostrils alone have a diameter of 30 feet (over 9 metres) each. It will be even taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza and the Washington Monument.

The face is over 87 feet tall - the Rushmore faces are 60 feet

This poster shows the projected dimensions,
including a 44 foot feather headdress atop his head

What’s even more bizarre here is that no one is completely sure what Crazy Horse actually looked like. When the project was first considered, two warriors who fought with Crazy Horse at Little Bighorn - so now ancient - described him and a portrait was created. The two fighters were said to have been struck by how much it looked like Crazy Horse. Well give them the benefit of the doubt.

This man's name was Red Cloud

Some of the more intricate carving is done by
ropes like this and pulleys inside the rock

When finished, it will look phenomenal. One can only hope that it gets the same respect and number of visitors as nearby Mount Rushmore. Frankly, it’s not even the bare minimum that could be done after the treatment of all Native American tribes, not just the Sioux. Maybe if they could remove a hangover from fireball whisky shots while they’re at it…

A scaled model of what hopefully will be there in the future

I wonder whether Calvin Coolidge approves of the heads -
he was US President when the Rushmore project was started

Some of us are a bit worse for wear in this picture!

Love you all,

Matt