Oh Give Me a Home...

"Where the buffalo roam"  Custer State Park is a marvelous place to see wild animals moving freely.  It's a huge sprawling place, and we were thrilled to see about 100 of their herd of over a thousand American bison as they lumbered across a road.  My image of buffalo is of them grazing on the prairie, but this herd was coming out of a stand of trees.  The bull pictured here is happily scratching an itch on one of those trees.  I shot the photo from the safety of our vehicle, but with the windows down we were impressed by the animals' size and the deep noises they made.

"Where the deer and the antelope play"  We saw pronghorn antelope everywhere.  These were in Custer State Park, but we saw dozens grazing along side cattle in Wyoming and South Dakota.  The state park and surrounding area also has burrows, mule and white tail deer, elk, and mountain goats.
"Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day"  OK, so sometimes the skies are cloudy.  After several days of brilliant blue skies a few clouds made the Crazy Horse Memorial easy on the eyes.  I had seen the mountain in 1960 with my grandparents, and remember nothing more than a white outline on the side of the rock.  While the project isn't nearly finished, there is still much to see.  Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who worked on Mt. Rushmore, was approached by Lakota chief Henry Standing Bear in 1948 to create a memorial to Crazy Horse to remind people that Native Americans have heroes too. We were impressed with the other part of the complex there, the film with background on the project, the huge museum dedicated to many aspects of Native American history and culture, and even the gift shop.  We passed up an evening laser light show, though we did have one more exciting moment a day or so later.  We were on top of an observation tower miles away in the state park when we heard a boom.  At first we thought it was thunder, but then a cloud of dust rose from the Crazy Horse monument.  They are continuing to chip away at the area under the sculpture's arm.  

Mt. Rushmore

I did this little sketch in my Moleskine at Mt. Rushmore.  There was a nice shady amphitheater, so I sat and drew a couple minutes.  It turned out to be almost the only drawing I did on the trip.

Here is my husband and his sisters on a 1968 trip.  We both remember the monument as being less well developed, just a small visitors' center and place to eat or buy souvenirs. Today it takes all day to see the museum displays and films, visit the sculptor's studio, and see the evening program and night lighting ceremony.

I had no idea about the original plans for the Mt. Rushmore monument until we saw the original model Gutzom Borglund made to guide his workers.  The original plans included what you see here, but money concerns, the quality of rock lower on the mountain, and the sculptor's death halted work.  

We walked a path under the monument that revealed all sorts of interesting alternate views. Maybe I'll give a shot at drawing or painting from the reference photos I took.

Westward Expansion

This is me, posing for my grandmother with my Brownie camera at South Dakota's Badlands, in 1960.

This is my husband and me last week in the Badlands. There is nothing like a photograph to inspire me to returning to eating sensibly and working out.

Here I am again in 1960, riding a Depression era cement Protoceratops at Rapid City's Dinosaur Park.

This creature has been moved from its hilltop location, has been repainted, and has lost its clutch of eggs. I have grown too big to sit on cement dinosaurs.

My husband and I just returned from a ten day trip in the West. It began as a reunion with college friends in Colorado Springs, but ended up being a reprise of family vacations each of us took in the early 1960's. Most of my early vacation pictures are pretty poor, faded, off kilter, poor resolution, though my Photoshop program can doctor them up a bit. Still they are a good reminders of the trips I took with my grandparents. My dad was a dairy farmer who could not leave his herd, and my mother just hated to travel. But my grandparents liked to explore, and being the oldest grandchild, the only one who didn't get carsick, I was lucky to be invited along on their vacations.
Both my husband I visited the Dinosaur Park in Rapid City, South Dakota, as children, but neither of us remembered that the park was at the top of the highest hill in the city, with a beautiful and dizzying view. The life-sized cement dinosaurs were built in 1936 as a WPA project, and today the simple shapes and benign expressions are more like Barney than Jurassic Park. But it was fun to see them again, pleasant to see the view, and we shared a rootbeer float and considered how time passes. It occurred to me that one might plan a whole trip centered on dinosaurs, with all the emphasis on fossils in the Black Hills area. Maybe next time we'll go to Hot Springs to see the Mammoth Dig site.

I remembered driving through the Badlands with my grandparents in their pink Rambler with no air conditioner. It was hot. Really hot. Grandma's way of keeping Grandpa and me reasonably cool was to have a large Thermos jug of ice water and a box of Wash-n-dry towelettes in the car. I remember thinking the drive through the fantastically colored and eroded landscape took days, though it obviously was no more than an afternoon. This time we had the AC on the whole time, carried bottled water, and wore hats, and the experience was a good one, though I was nervous about all the signs warning us about rattlesnakes. I never saw one, though we saw black-tailed prairie dogs and lots of birds.
We drove so much, covered so much ground, that I barely used my sketchbook. I'll post what I did sketch later, and I hope to work from some reference photos. Meanwhile, I'm still digesting what we saw, and trying to get laundry done and mail read.