Horsethief Lake
After that we headed to Mount Rushmore National Memorial. It had been raining all day, but luckily it started to clear up while we were at the Crazy Horse Memorial. We stopped at Horsethief Lake on our way up and it was beautiful. It’s just a small little lake on your way up and we couldn’t resist taking a walk down by it.
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore was pretty amazing though. Mark especially loved it – I am pretty confident that that was his favorite place we went to. We got there around six o’clock. We walked around a trail that went along the bottom of the mountain and it was the perfect night to do it.
We definitely took our time because we wanted to stay until nine when they did their “lighting program.” That was definitely my favorite part of our visit to Mount Rushmore. The ranger gave a speech and then they showed a movie about each of the different presidents represented. It was really neat. By this point, it was pretty much completely dark outside. They then gradually turned on the lights on the mountain. It was beautiful. They then invited all of the veterans, or currently serving military, to come down on the stage. I was really disappointed by how many people left for this – I felt like it was incredibly disrespectful and made me sad to see that people don’t see that. But they had them take down the flag and then had each of them line up and state their name and which branch of the military they served in. I love things like that.
We, of course, had to get some little souvenirs from our trip there. We even picked up a little stuffed animal for our little guy – after all he did make the trip with us 🙂 Mark picked out a Mount Rushmore buffalo.
