25 September - Monday - Mr. Rushmore (finally)

Because today is to be our last day in the Rapid City area, we figured we’d better go and do Mt. Rushmore as real tourists!

Margaret writes:
And we did. It is quite impressive up close and on the approach driving north from Custer State Park. Imagine coming around a tight curve in the midst of the forest, or approaching a one-lane tunnel chiseled out of the mountain – and there they are (the Rushmore carvings), catching the sunlight.

The aspens are lovely too, shades of yellow, luminous in the sunlight making the pines even darker by contrast. The ground sparkled like diamonds, glittered with mica and pyrite. I started gathering stones and pieces, then realized it was a silly thing to do.

Wayne risked life and limb, setting up his tripod and camera in the middle of the road. It was truly amazing how many cars speed by completely missing the vista or the object of his lens.

Wayne writes:
Hard to believe how much Margaret can go on in person. But when handed a computer and told to write, she writes three meager paragraphs. I, on the other hand, find it hard to stop typing. Some call it free-flow; others, rambling!

I find South Dakota to be a real photographic inspiration. Not only the usual stuff, but the trees, rocks, plains, gullies, everywhere you look there is a photo op. I could spend a lot of time here. Now if I could just learn how to capture what I see and do it justice.

A point of clarification. Margaret mentioned me setting up the tripod in the middle of the road to capture the Rushmore carvings through the tunnel. A little known aspect of digital photography and Adobe Photoshop, is that if you take a photograph AND two others, one f-stop over and one f-stop under of exactly the same image, you can merge these in software and accommodate both the shadows and the highlights. In order for this to work however, all three images must be exactly the same, i.e., no hand-holding; it must be from a tripod. I’m not a tripod-person by nature, but for this “experiment”, it’s a must. I’ll let you know how it came out when I get home to a “real” computer!

The other thing I realized last night that I have been writing these blogs and the single-photo posting in reverse order. It was the order I thought of it, but I realized that when it’s all posted, the single-photo comes up first (it was done last) and the background explanation comes later. I apologize for mixing this and hope you were able to put it all together in your head while reading.

To finish up our day(s) in Rapid City, we dropped off the week’s load of laundry. We have found it a lot easier to have someone else do the washing and folding instead of wasting 2 – 3 hours in a noisy, smelly Laundromat when we could be out sightseeing (or shopping!). After some thought, we realized that after you count in the soap, bleach, and quarters, having someone else do it isn’t much more expensive than doing it yourself! Not to mention the time involved.

We have really enjoyed this RV park, perched on the edge of the hill above Rapid City. It’s a lot like Mulholland Drive and the Hollywood Hills with a view of the lights of LA beneath. Very enjoyable.

Tomorrow it’s on the road again. Not much to see between here and eastern South Dakota, but it’s gotta be done.