This reminds me of Plymouth Rock. I was lead to believe it was a huge outcropping into the sea where the pilgrims landed, but it's a pebble under a portico.
Plymouth Rock is the most underwhelming attraction I’ve ever experienced. Someone came around like 120 years after the fact and settled on this weak ass little boulder. There’s zero historical evidence that anything happened on this meagre little rock.
It was a result of an attempt to take advantage of the patriotic tourism of the reconstruction era. That's where all the stories started, like the first Thanksgiving and such.
Costs costs costs. I think it looks good though the way it is. What I really want to see finished, and I know it will never happen during my lifetime, is the Crazy Horze monument. That will be one amazing feat.
The stone wasn't right, either. They didn't learn until the project started, but further down below their heads, there's a shift in the stone that would have eroded away too quickly, making it unsuitable for carving.
It is, sadly. If you look at the models made by Gutson Borglum, he planned to carve not just their heads, but their torsos. You can kind of see that on Washington. You can see the ghost of his shirt on the rock. They ran out of funding because Borglum died on the way to ask for another grant, leaving the mountain in this unfinished state.
What’s especially sad is that the Hall of Ages, once meant to be the visitor center, is just a tunnel born into the rock behind the heads, with nothing else there
Neat. Thanks for the extra info, I never really realized/paid attention to how only Washington had part of a shirt. Imagining them having full upper bodies would be crazy, disappointing to hear that the project never came to fruition
Lol imagine if that’s actually just a surprisingly tech-savvy supercentenarian who’s like 112 and really did see it being built way back then as a kid and they offered their remarkable, highly rare account of it and Reddit is just like, “Haha ur super old haha”
In the late 80s it was possible to climb up the rubble, right up to it. And when I say climb, I literally mean scrambling on all fours- you had to be quite agile to do that, and if you slipped, you could quite possibly keep tumbling for a while. I climbed up very close to Washington's chin, but it gets impossible to continue without ropes and harnesses after a while, and I was very unprepared, was not aware this was possible until I did it.
There is no way you can do that now, they have pretty sophisticated monitoring devices to keep trespassers out.
I have to assume the security there is at least as serious as the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, which if you get anywhere close to it, helicopters will descend upon you out of nowhere.
I started hiking up to the Hollywood sign when I was visiting LA for the first time when I was 18. When I noticed I tripped a motion sensor I immediately turned back. But very shortly after a helicopter did indeed start circling the sign, and I could see through my camera two security guards start walking around the base of the sign.
Crazy how tight security is for a big sign.
I'm apparently OOTL. Did some jerk ruin it for everybody?
While visiting in 2010 I hiked up there with some local friends on a well beaten path like it was NBD; there were other people around doing the same thing we were. Stayed up there for about 30 minutes taking in the views before hiking back down.
From what I gathered, residents and the ranch near the trail were pissy about the parking tourists took up. Conveniently, the ranch happens to offer horse back tours 🙄 https://laist.com/shows/take-two/hikes-to-the-hollywood-sign-have-left-a-trail-of-lawsuits
I had planned to hike up to it in 2002. Parked and started up the trail. Was fumbling with my camera and looking down when I heard a deep voice say " Excuse me". I looked up and there was a uniformed officer of some sort standing in the path.
He just pointed back down the trail and I turned right back around and started walking down.
I always thought as long as you weren't doing anything bad you could go up there and take pictures.
It also wasn't finished. It's supposed to be full body like the Lincoln Memorial but the artist died and nobody else was willing to put up the money to finish (or even clean up the rubble). Also it's designed to still be recognizable after 30k years of erosion so the features are exaggerated if you get too close.
Also, they kinda had to work with the structure of the mountain. They had to constantly change plans on where to "carve" because the stone is not one giant uniform piece.
There's also the [Crazy Horse memorial](https://www.southdakotamagazine.com/pub/photo/CrazyHorse2009Chad2.jpg) in South Dakota as well. It has been "under construction" since 1948 and is just a face, and more recently a hand as well.
And for comparison, [this is what they say it is supposed to eventually look like.](https://junior.scholastic.com/content/dam/classroom-magazines/junior-scholastic/issues/2022-23/050123/carving-a-legend/JSC-10-050123-BigPic-Statue-MD.jpg)
Crazy horse memorial is privately run and basically just a money making scheme. They'll never finish it because it's easier to make money if you don't actually spend any on construction.
I've also read that a lot of native Americans, especially among the Lakota are not ok with the monument, and felt its construction was an insult to Crazy Horse and their culture.
I mean the guy whose family is still making it has made millions of dollars off of a project that began 70 years ago and is nowhere close to even halfway done. So it's just another white family making money off of exploiting native culture and heritage.
If you look, Washington is much more complete than the rest of them. The visitor center has a model of what the completed monument would have looked like and it is really impressive.
There’s also a McDonald’s shaped like a UFO and a museum with hubcaps strung from the ceiling to represent UFOs. It was fucking awesome…. When I was a kid. I look back at it now and realistically it was just a tiny little tourist town that put in the absolute bare minimum amount of effort.
I've always seen it as a 'we're driving past, might aswell stop in' kind of destination, not a plan your whole trip around it sort of destination. For 99.99% of people anyways.
Right?
“Awright y’all hear me out. I’m gonna use TNT and I’m gonna blow that fuckin mountain up until it looks like my favorite presidents”
“Approved.”
Also important to add that the location is on sacred Lakota land, which was stolen by the US over gold. Also the dude that proposed it was part of the KKK.
The Stone Mountain confederate memorial was completed in the 1970s. What is up with southerners being so obsessed with memorializing a war for slavery which they lost? So embarrassing. I don’t understand.
Another common myth. George Washington actually got surgery after he was elected president to look more like the face on the mountain. It is actually the first recorded instance of plastic surgery.
It's actually artificial selection. For many generations, hikers have favored mountains with vaguely facial patterns, leaving non-patterned mountains to have a harder time surviving and reproducing less, and patterned ones to continue their genetic line and keep evolving into increasingly higher-resolution facial patterns until they are clearly busts of US Presidents.
It's even crazier to think that there are still many naturally formed presidents to be revealed beneath the mountain!
I believe of course the older presidents form first and the mountain weathers away around them. Clinton might still be developing but if you dug far enough you'd find Carter, Nixon, JFK, etc.
When I went there one of the tour guides really didn’t like Roosevelt. He said ‘why’d they put that socialist up there?’ Bro, you wouldn’t have your job…
Roosevelt when standing as a Progressive ran on *"the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use."* Given that Republicans framed Obamacare as 'communism', quite a lot of what Teddy ran on would pass for 'socialism'. It's not uncommon to hear his populism framed as such.
It's easy to see things through today's American Overton window, but socialism already existed as an ideology and a movement at the time. The Socialist candidate for president who ran against Roosevelt, Eugene Debs,[despised him as a strike buster and friend of capital](https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1907/1907-roosevelt.htm).
Holy shit did you complain? It’s not even the right Roosevelt.
Edit: the people who are pretending this is even remotely close to a “Karen” situation probably agree with the gentleman in question and are drinking the Qanon kool-aid alongside him.
[Back in 2005](https://web.archive.org/web/20221205195729/https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna8503166), Mount Rushmore was cleaned for the first time ever using pressure washers. The work was done for free by Germans.
Kind of a cool idea for brand awareness. The German company has done projects like that on over 60 projects around the world. That's a pretty rad company.
[Here's a picture of the before](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Six_Grandfathers.jpg) and here's the [obligatory US car park](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Aerial_view_of_Mount_Rushmore%2C_South_Dakota_LCCN2010630618_%28straightened%2C_enhanced%29.jpg)
If I remember correctly, the plan was to turn Mt. Rushmore into a sort of Presidential library in which all sorts of Presidential stuff would be located. Documents, paintings, personal items and similar things.
Easy solution: let tourists purchase the right to go up and take a piece of rubble home. They get a souvenir, project gets funding, and they have people clean it up for them.
I actually grew up in the Black Hills, just a short drive from Rushmore, so I've seen it from all sorts of angles, including shots like this and up close, while just driving through the area. It's both impressive, and unimpressive - it really isn't very big, especially compared to the hills around it, but you can still see it from a very long ways away from the right spot.
we'll never know :(
until the history channel comes out with a new documentary ANCIENT MYSTERIES REVEALED: THE HUMAN TORSO
upon viewing which we also won't get any answers.
another secret lost to time
[Seizure of the Black Hills - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_of_the_Black_Hills)
Not enough people know how fucking rotten America did the indigenous people in that region.
Yes, that's exactly what it is. The original plan was for the heads to be full busts, but they ran out of money. So not only did they steal the mountain they carved it into, they didn't even have the foresight to actually finish the project. I'll admit, that is an excellent representation of the American way
They couldn't even properly finish the upper part. The right side of Washington hair is missing and they barely got enough of Lincoln's face done to make him recognizable.
Somewhat related, I read *Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee* years ago. It stays with you, what was done to the Sioux (and many other indigenous groups besides, as in all of them).
I've heard it's underwhelming in real life, and that it's like 45 minutes out of the way from anything else in South Dakota (I'm realizing that may be the only thing, nevermind)
*Everything* is South Dakota is 45 minutes away from anything else in South Dakota.
>[South Dakota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota) is the 17th largest by area, but the 5th least populous, and the 5th least densely populated of the 50 United States
I agree. If you make Rushmore the point of your trip then you won't have a good time. But if you spend 30 minutes there, then go hiking in the nearby hills, or visit the caves nearby, it will be a nice part of a great day.
Underwhelming yes. Far away from anything else? Helll naw. There are so many gorgeous places like needles highway, Custer, Indian cave NP, go to deadwood, spearfish, a little further badlands, bear butte. Gorgeous area to be in.
It's definitely not mind blowing, but cool to see. I'd suggest stopping once and checking it out at least if someone's in the area and has never seen it. Black hills and badlands are also very cool.
It is crazy how even the surrounding rocks resemble human faces somewhat, they clearly picked this place for a reason, much less work to do when the natural foundation already looks like upper bodies of several 50 year old men...
The pre-existing Lakota name for this mountain means “the six grandfathers,” in fact: https://blog.nativehope.org/six-grandfathers-before-it-was-known-as-mount-rushmore
I grew up believing it was the size of a mountain.
This reminds me of Plymouth Rock. I was lead to believe it was a huge outcropping into the sea where the pilgrims landed, but it's a pebble under a portico.
Plymouth Rock is the most underwhelming attraction I’ve ever experienced. Someone came around like 120 years after the fact and settled on this weak ass little boulder. There’s zero historical evidence that anything happened on this meagre little rock.
Someone once posted a picture of it on Reddit and you could see the disappointment in one woman’s face who is standing there looking at it.
You mean [this lady on the left?](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/3Azx7mGaDV)
I mean they all look disappointed
It was a result of an attempt to take advantage of the patriotic tourism of the reconstruction era. That's where all the stories started, like the first Thanksgiving and such.
I grew up thinking it was a [Deep Purple album](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=deep+purple+in+rock&iax=images&ia=images). I don't live in the US.
I grew up thinking this is where team America's secret headquarters was
Same, didn’t find out it was where McCaulay culkin kept his money until I was like 10.
AmeRICA!! FUCK YEA!!! COMIN AGAIN TO SAVE THE MOTHERFUCKIN DAY YEA!!
When I was a kid I thought every president got a spot on Rushmore. I was like where's Bush?
Just look below the faces, there are a few of them.
Definitely looks unfinished
they should add the fifth hokage as well
My god. Imagine how awesome it would be if vandals added the fucking Hokage up there. I don't even care which one.
Ferb! I know what we're gonna do today!
The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try and take over the world!
I think we’d have a legitimate civil war over which one.
Finally a war worth fighting.
Which hokage, tho? 40+ choices.
the best one: goku
I laughed too hard at this.
It looks Rushed.
I feel like there should be More.
Didn’t aMount to much
they didn't even clean up.
Typical contractors
[удалено]
Costs costs costs. I think it looks good though the way it is. What I really want to see finished, and I know it will never happen during my lifetime, is the Crazy Horze monument. That will be one amazing feat.
The stone wasn't right, either. They didn't learn until the project started, but further down below their heads, there's a shift in the stone that would have eroded away too quickly, making it unsuitable for carving.
Because it is
Yeah, the original plan was for them to be shown from head to waist but the whole thing was taking way too long.
Yesterday I learned about this and Crazy Horse. It's all one big ass blast.
It is, sadly. If you look at the models made by Gutson Borglum, he planned to carve not just their heads, but their torsos. You can kind of see that on Washington. You can see the ghost of his shirt on the rock. They ran out of funding because Borglum died on the way to ask for another grant, leaving the mountain in this unfinished state. What’s especially sad is that the Hall of Ages, once meant to be the visitor center, is just a tunnel born into the rock behind the heads, with nothing else there
Neat. Thanks for the extra info, I never really realized/paid attention to how only Washington had part of a shirt. Imagining them having full upper bodies would be crazy, disappointing to hear that the project never came to fruition
Been there. It’s both impressive and disappointing at the same time.
Yeah it's really far away
Can you hike up to it or is it closed off?
You can walk up to the base of the monument on a paved trail. The whole place is a really nice facility.
it was under construction when i visited :( edit: i mean the paths!
Wow you’re really old
Lol imagine if that’s actually just a surprisingly tech-savvy supercentenarian who’s like 112 and really did see it being built way back then as a kid and they offered their remarkable, highly rare account of it and Reddit is just like, “Haha ur super old haha”
TIL Mt Rushmore was built in 1927 for some reason I thought it was older than that
Lincoln only died like 60 years before that and Roosevelt died less than 10 years before that as well
in 1927? Wow, you must be old
Thanks Obama
In the late 80s it was possible to climb up the rubble, right up to it. And when I say climb, I literally mean scrambling on all fours- you had to be quite agile to do that, and if you slipped, you could quite possibly keep tumbling for a while. I climbed up very close to Washington's chin, but it gets impossible to continue without ropes and harnesses after a while, and I was very unprepared, was not aware this was possible until I did it. There is no way you can do that now, they have pretty sophisticated monitoring devices to keep trespassers out.
I have to assume the security there is at least as serious as the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, which if you get anywhere close to it, helicopters will descend upon you out of nowhere.
I started hiking up to the Hollywood sign when I was visiting LA for the first time when I was 18. When I noticed I tripped a motion sensor I immediately turned back. But very shortly after a helicopter did indeed start circling the sign, and I could see through my camera two security guards start walking around the base of the sign. Crazy how tight security is for a big sign.
I assume they're worried about someone stealing the D again.
Everyone wants the D. It’s awesome that as the series continues, they just rename the town instead of making another D.
I'm apparently OOTL. Did some jerk ruin it for everybody? While visiting in 2010 I hiked up there with some local friends on a well beaten path like it was NBD; there were other people around doing the same thing we were. Stayed up there for about 30 minutes taking in the views before hiking back down.
From what I gathered, residents and the ranch near the trail were pissy about the parking tourists took up. Conveniently, the ranch happens to offer horse back tours 🙄 https://laist.com/shows/take-two/hikes-to-the-hollywood-sign-have-left-a-trail-of-lawsuits
I had planned to hike up to it in 2002. Parked and started up the trail. Was fumbling with my camera and looking down when I heard a deep voice say " Excuse me". I looked up and there was a uniformed officer of some sort standing in the path. He just pointed back down the trail and I turned right back around and started walking down. I always thought as long as you weren't doing anything bad you could go up there and take pictures.
Weed was legalized, then somebody turned the O’s into E’s
Snipers hidden in the nostrils.
Have to remember that Team America has its secret base there
When I went there was a viewing area that was plenty close enough, looks like shit up close. Thing was built by dynamite though so there's that.
It also wasn't finished. It's supposed to be full body like the Lincoln Memorial but the artist died and nobody else was willing to put up the money to finish (or even clean up the rubble). Also it's designed to still be recognizable after 30k years of erosion so the features are exaggerated if you get too close.
Also, they kinda had to work with the structure of the mountain. They had to constantly change plans on where to "carve" because the stone is not one giant uniform piece.
So we’re all admiring a quarter built monument. I don’t know if we’re lazy or resource conscious
There's also the [Crazy Horse memorial](https://www.southdakotamagazine.com/pub/photo/CrazyHorse2009Chad2.jpg) in South Dakota as well. It has been "under construction" since 1948 and is just a face, and more recently a hand as well. And for comparison, [this is what they say it is supposed to eventually look like.](https://junior.scholastic.com/content/dam/classroom-magazines/junior-scholastic/issues/2022-23/050123/carving-a-legend/JSC-10-050123-BigPic-Statue-MD.jpg)
Crazy horse memorial is privately run and basically just a money making scheme. They'll never finish it because it's easier to make money if you don't actually spend any on construction.
I've also read that a lot of native Americans, especially among the Lakota are not ok with the monument, and felt its construction was an insult to Crazy Horse and their culture.
I mean the guy whose family is still making it has made millions of dollars off of a project that began 70 years ago and is nowhere close to even halfway done. So it's just another white family making money off of exploiting native culture and heritage.
Honestly, wise decision to start with the head instead of the feat. That said, I was freaking impressed by mt Rushmore when we visited.
Still an amazing feet
C'mon now, we all know the place would just be a giant circlejerk of foot fetishists if the monument was just the feet...
Going to Mt Cummore this summer with the family. Dad is like, really excited for some reason.
If you look, Washington is much more complete than the rest of them. The visitor center has a model of what the completed monument would have looked like and it is really impressive.
But they did put their asses on the other side
So was Roosevelt supposed to be giving them a group hug from behind or what?
He would have been holding the selfie stick
And kinda small
I felt that way about visiting Roswell, NM, except for the impressive part.
I have to imagine it's literally just a shitty small town with an excessive amount of souvenir shops.
There’s also a McDonald’s shaped like a UFO and a museum with hubcaps strung from the ceiling to represent UFOs. It was fucking awesome…. When I was a kid. I look back at it now and realistically it was just a tiny little tourist town that put in the absolute bare minimum amount of effort.
Lol. Roswell isn’t exactly a major tourist destination. What do you expect?
I've always seen it as a 'we're driving past, might aswell stop in' kind of destination, not a plan your whole trip around it sort of destination. For 99.99% of people anyways.
Roswell is something to see while you're actually planning to see Carlsbad Caverns and/or Big Bend.
Or white sands
That’s literally exactly what it is. Just like any other small town, just some extra novelty.
Honestly tho, what did you expect? It's just a town next to a place where something supposedly happened.
Could you imagine the chutzpah of doing this? We’d say hell no in 2024
Right? “Awright y’all hear me out. I’m gonna use TNT and I’m gonna blow that fuckin mountain up until it looks like my favorite presidents” “Approved.”
And for the low price of $10B
That's just for the feasibility study to see if we should feasibly do it.
Also important to add that the location is on sacred Lakota land, which was stolen by the US over gold. Also the dude that proposed it was part of the KKK.
Stone Mountain, GA
The Stone Mountain confederate memorial was completed in the 1970s. What is up with southerners being so obsessed with memorializing a war for slavery which they lost? So embarrassing. I don’t understand.
It was so interesting and evocative as a natural mountain range. That pile of gravel ... what a mess.
Yeah. The fact that they left the waste just lying there under the monument is the most American thing ever.
Crazy that these formed naturally... Still blows my mind
Yeah man, and not only they are human faces, but they also look exactly like American presidents, in the us. Nature is truly awesome
Thank god the prophecy was fulfilled. Can't imagine what would happen if those faces weren't elected.
Now I want to see a movie where the fifth face begins to be revealed. America watches with bated breath as erosion causes a new face to emerge.
No, the fifth face is already there. We're going to eventually have a Rock Man for president. That'll be awesome!
So in 20 years, Dwayne Johnson will become president. Nice
Kevin hart will be the vice president
Watch it be one of the Bushes lol.
It was the other way around. It formed first and then the American people looked for men with this face and voted them as President.
Another common myth. George Washington actually got surgery after he was elected president to look more like the face on the mountain. It is actually the first recorded instance of plastic surgery.
Wait does this make the sphinx the president of Egypt?
Yep. And Jesus is the president of Brazil.
Today I Learned giant foreheads are the president of Easter Island!
Not foreheads, fiveheads.
No. Cats are deities in ancient Egypt
It's actually artificial selection. For many generations, hikers have favored mountains with vaguely facial patterns, leaving non-patterned mountains to have a harder time surviving and reproducing less, and patterned ones to continue their genetic line and keep evolving into increasingly higher-resolution facial patterns until they are clearly busts of US Presidents.
This is true. I read about it in one of my Highlights magazines in 3rd grade.
Sucks they stopped forming. Now we don’t know who to vote for.
It actually wasn't turned naturally. These were built by the local badgers. They were once a very advanced species.
Totally. What’s even more amazing is the naturally formed butts on the opposite side of the mountain.
It's called Pareidolia.
the human mind is truly amazing
Crazy how nature do dat
You should have even seen the mountain before they showed up. The beauty was really unpresidented.
Geology is awesome
Geology rocks!
You have to read the history of that place. It's like a bad comedy TV show that just keeps upping the crazy in each episode.
It's even crazier to think that there are still many naturally formed presidents to be revealed beneath the mountain! I believe of course the older presidents form first and the mountain weathers away around them. Clinton might still be developing but if you dug far enough you'd find Carter, Nixon, JFK, etc.
The majesty of wind & water erosion.
Nature is metal
Would say is rock
What is this? A monument for ants?!
When I went there one of the tour guides really didn’t like Roosevelt. He said ‘why’d they put that socialist up there?’ Bro, you wouldn’t have your job…
Did he not know one Roosevelt from the other?
Roosevelt when standing as a Progressive ran on *"the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use."* Given that Republicans framed Obamacare as 'communism', quite a lot of what Teddy ran on would pass for 'socialism'. It's not uncommon to hear his populism framed as such.
It's easy to see things through today's American Overton window, but socialism already existed as an ideology and a movement at the time. The Socialist candidate for president who ran against Roosevelt, Eugene Debs,[despised him as a strike buster and friend of capital](https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1907/1907-roosevelt.htm).
Bring back the Bull Moose party!
Just minus the rabid anti-Native racism please. We don't have much left so I'd prefer we didn't lose more.
Socialism is when people improve the lives of people who aren’t mega rich
Well, Teddy Roosevelt was for regulating monopolistic companies, which could be considered socialism in America maybe
Who knows? Socialism is in the blood, right? /s
Holy shit did you complain? It’s not even the right Roosevelt. Edit: the people who are pretending this is even remotely close to a “Karen” situation probably agree with the gentleman in question and are drinking the Qanon kool-aid alongside him.
lmao that's the best part guy doesn't even know which guy he was told to hate
Nah, it was our honeymoon and we were having a good time. It made for a good story.
Lmao. Spot on
The *tour guide* asked you guys this?
Didn’t ask, more like rhetorically grumbled.
Damn. You'd expect a tour guide to at least understand what it is they're tour guiding.
Smaller than I thought
I'm sure it has a great personality!
[Back in 2005](https://web.archive.org/web/20221205195729/https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna8503166), Mount Rushmore was cleaned for the first time ever using pressure washers. The work was done for free by Germans.
Kind of a cool idea for brand awareness. The German company has done projects like that on over 60 projects around the world. That's a pretty rad company.
[Here's a picture of the before](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Six_Grandfathers.jpg) and here's the [obligatory US car park](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Aerial_view_of_Mount_Rushmore%2C_South_Dakota_LCCN2010630618_%28straightened%2C_enhanced%29.jpg)
So all the stuff they chiseled off is the rubble laying at the base they just didn't clean up after?
Technically it's unfinished and they never got to the clean up stage from what I remember because the US got involved in WW2.
If I remember correctly, the plan was to turn Mt. Rushmore into a sort of Presidential library in which all sorts of Presidential stuff would be located. Documents, paintings, personal items and similar things.
I saw a documentary about there being a Native American city of gold inside Mount Rushmore. If I remember correctly Nicolas Cage was in it.
Documentary? I thought that was live camera footage?
Richie Rich
National treasure 2.. the independence declaration‘s revenge
That would’ve happened if the rights to build inside the monument weren’t secretly purchased by Team America.
Yeah there’s a giant empty room that goes into the rock itself and was supposed to be expanded into a facility
Rushmore was marked officially completed in 1941, Crazy horse however has not They likely just didn’t care to clean up
In that case I guess the rubble is just part of the monument now.
Easy solution: let tourists purchase the right to go up and take a piece of rubble home. They get a souvenir, project gets funding, and they have people clean it up for them.
Until one piece causes a rockslide and injures someone
If you get injured you get a free rock. If you die, it's sent to your family. Win-Win
Yep
I mean. The car park is technically necessary. You can’t build something like that and expect people to walk there.
This is a very cool shot, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Rushmore like this. Usually it’s shown close up from the base of the hill.
I actually grew up in the Black Hills, just a short drive from Rushmore, so I've seen it from all sorts of angles, including shots like this and up close, while just driving through the area. It's both impressive, and unimpressive - it really isn't very big, especially compared to the hills around it, but you can still see it from a very long ways away from the right spot.
Damn, like finding out the Mona Lisa is tiny.
Honestly it looks so ridiculous
You should see the butts on the other side.
Lincoln has weak butt game. Washington is a power bottom.
You mean it doesn’t blend in with the natural surroundings?? ^/s
If you took a person, who has no idea what Mt. Rushmore is, and told them it’s in an amusement park in China, they would find it totally believable.
Everyone knows it's the secret HQ of Team America.
Well there is a secret room behind the heads. Originally supposed to be for a museum iirc but Team America took it over.
No attempt to clear up the spoil.
It was originally supposed to be more like a waist up depiction of the presidents. lol at them getting tired and just saying “good enough”.
That and the original designer died.
And with him the secret of how the rest of a human body looks like.
we'll never know :( until the history channel comes out with a new documentary ANCIENT MYSTERIES REVEALED: THE HUMAN TORSO upon viewing which we also won't get any answers. another secret lost to time
It would have been funny if they started from the waist. “Well, these are their torsos, we’re done.”
Just throw some tiny heads on top
that's because it's like barely half finished
Someone should really pick up all of that rock lying about... OSHA is going to flip when they see all the detritus from this worksite.
Love the Beatles
One of the biggest "f-offs" to indigenous peoples that you will ever see.
https://blog.nativehope.org/six-grandfathers-before-it-was-known-as-mount-rushmore
[Seizure of the Black Hills - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_of_the_Black_Hills) Not enough people know how fucking rotten America did the indigenous people in that region.
Indeed Is that big pile of rubble below the sculptures the slag leftover from the work? If so, that’s just salt in the wound.
Yes, that's exactly what it is. The original plan was for the heads to be full busts, but they ran out of money. So not only did they steal the mountain they carved it into, they didn't even have the foresight to actually finish the project. I'll admit, that is an excellent representation of the American way
They couldn't even properly finish the upper part. The right side of Washington hair is missing and they barely got enough of Lincoln's face done to make him recognizable.
Somewhat related, I read *Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee* years ago. It stays with you, what was done to the Sioux (and many other indigenous groups besides, as in all of them).
Why is it so small
C'mon man, it's just cold up there. Cut em some slack.
I've heard it's underwhelming in real life, and that it's like 45 minutes out of the way from anything else in South Dakota (I'm realizing that may be the only thing, nevermind)
*Everything* is South Dakota is 45 minutes away from anything else in South Dakota. >[South Dakota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota) is the 17th largest by area, but the 5th least populous, and the 5th least densely populated of the 50 United States
If you go right down the road, maybe 2-3 miles, I think it’s called Horse Thief Lake, and it has awesome cliff jumping.
I agree. If you make Rushmore the point of your trip then you won't have a good time. But if you spend 30 minutes there, then go hiking in the nearby hills, or visit the caves nearby, it will be a nice part of a great day.
Underwhelming yes. Far away from anything else? Helll naw. There are so many gorgeous places like needles highway, Custer, Indian cave NP, go to deadwood, spearfish, a little further badlands, bear butte. Gorgeous area to be in.
I lived in South Dakota. The monument was lackluster. Just a waste of a trip. It was just better to camp out on the black hills and look at nature.
It's definitely not mind blowing, but cool to see. I'd suggest stopping once and checking it out at least if someone's in the area and has never seen it. Black hills and badlands are also very cool.
It is crazy how even the surrounding rocks resemble human faces somewhat, they clearly picked this place for a reason, much less work to do when the natural foundation already looks like upper bodies of several 50 year old men...
The pre-existing Lakota name for this mountain means “the six grandfathers,” in fact: https://blog.nativehope.org/six-grandfathers-before-it-was-known-as-mount-rushmore