Our route today takes us north from Alliance to Wounded Knee, SD then on to Mt. Rushmore and finally south through Wyoming into Colorado.
View 7a in a larger map
Our first stop was at Carhenge, just north of Alliance. This is a fairly accurate reconstruction of Stonehenge constructed out of cars. In addition to the Stonehenge replica, they had a number of other sculptures made out of cars or car parts.
This piece is suppose to represent the four seasons of wheat.
A short piece up the road from carhenge was the South Dakota border.
We made our way to Wounded Knee, but had some difficulty finding the cemetery that had the mass grave. We drove through town and saw a cemetery up a hill so we pulled off the road and started walking up the path. We hadn't gotten 100 yards when a car drives up the path and asks us if we were lost, that the mass grave was at the other end of town. It turns out that they guy that redirected us was a tribal leader and he had actually stopped to ask if we would mind if he took a picture of the car.
We left Wounded Knee and headed north for Mt. Rushmore. Along the way, we ran into some road construction which left the road in less than optimal state. At first it turned into loose gravel.
Not too much further we were routed off the road into a ravine where we were driving on loose dirt. I wasn't sure if we were going to make it, and am thankful that it hadn't rained recently. I'm glad that I had the entire car wrapped with venture shield before the trip, otherwise I'd have had many rock chips all over the car.
All this time, we found that in remote areas like this, we had no signal on the ipad which meant that it was useless for navigation, the GPS wasn't any good for finding alternative routes and the large scale paper maps we had didn't provide sufficient detail to navigate these back roads. We were really driving around hoping we were headed in the right direction. We did run into a small brush fire long the way. Several cars had stopped and the police had just showed up.
We did finally make it to our intended destination, but not quite the way we had intended. We were going to pass by Mt. Rushmore first and Crazy Horse after, but we ran into Crazy Horse first so we stopped. They still have a ways to go before they achieve their ultimate goal.
Finding Mt. Rushmore from the Crazy Horse location was easy so and only took 30 minutes or so. It is quite impressive in person, these pictures don't do it justice.
After departing Mt. Rushmore, we headed south through Wyoming. It was really amazing how wide open the geography is.
We worked our way south through Wyoming on back roads and hit the interstate just north of Casper, WY and followed it south into Colorado.
With all of the stops we made, this was a long day and we were looking forward to finding a room in Ft. Collins which is a short distance south of Casper. Unfortunately, once again we were unable to find a hotel room anywhere in Ft. Collins, and were able to secure one of the last few at the hotel in Longmont which is 20 miles further south. There was a large event in Casper that had all of the hotels as far as Ft. Collins booked.
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