Mount Rushmore, Fort Robinson and the Stimulus

On my Grand Northern Tour (ostensibly to add North Dakota as the 49th state I've been to, leaving only Alaska) I was able to soak in a few memories of family vacations past by hitting up Mount Rushmore and Fort Robinson.

In an obvious sense, Mount Rushmore is exactly as it was in the early 70s when Mom packed up the kids in the Town and Country wagon and exposed us to Pioneer Village, Valentine, Nebraska, a fresh new I-90, and the Black Hills. The four faces of the memorial are just as they were back then. This is despite the exhibits, educational videos and displays that all describe Gutzon Borglum's original vision to sculpt the Fab Four down to the torso. WW2 and a lack of funding stopped Mount Rushmore in the state we see it today.

And today you can "see" the memorial in a much more up-close way than us kids did 40 years ago. In 1998 a new walking/hiking trail was installed to allow visitors to get some really unique perspectives on the faces. I've added a couple of my pics here - you can really look up the noses, so to speak.

There are lots of other improvements as well, all of them costing far more than the whisker under $1 million that the original blasting, drilling and polishing originally cost. And it brings up an interesting point: Mount Rushmore remains unfinished. The original vision was indeed to show the necks and chests of the four presidents, and some Borglum's original plaster models on display clearly show this.

Also part of the original plan, and completely unknown to me in 1971, is the "Hall of Records" started behind Abe's countenance. It's a really, really big vault carved out of the solid granite of the mountain, originally designed to house the record of the monument's - and the nation's - construction through Borglum's era. Given the conspiracy theories surrounding the "mysterious" underground areas of Denver International Airport, I'm astounded that some kook hasn't created a website linking Mount Rushmore's Hall of Records to space aliens or the Illuminati. Even the movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets mentions this intriguing, unknown part of Mount Rushmore only a bit.

Here then is yet another way to stimulate the economy, provide hundreds of jobs, and enhance the pride of the USA: We should finish Mount Rushmore and the Hall of Records. I can't think of a better project than one that was started during the Great Depression and could be finished during the Great Recession.

Of course, it's difficult to see almost any change in this area of the country. A good example of that is Fort Robinson State Park in northern Nebraska, site of another O'Neill family vacation. (That one was in the summer of '70, just after Dad died.)

On my way home to Denver, I detoured through this sleepy park - and it was as if it were 1970 all over again. The barracks converted into a tourist court-like hotel seems exactly as it was 40 years ago. It's a sleepy, little-known converted Army post where you can go to disconnect, laze in the August heat, and forget about virtually everything else. It's the very definition of isolation. We kids had a blast in 1970; I can't imagine a kid in 2011 surviving more then two hours without his or her internet, iPhone, cable TV and fast food.