Montana and South Dakota

IS THIS MONTH'S JOURNEY

August 30, 2008

Montana is often referred to as “Big Sky” and during the time we spent there, it certainly lived up to its name because there wasn’t a cloud in its big, beautiful blue sky. However, there’s something else that’s big about Montana and that is its Big Vistas. I think in the future, when I speak of Montana, I will call it “Big Sky and Big Vista”, yea!
Virtually everywhere we looked, the land stretched out so far and wide, that it appeared to dwarf the buildings, trees, grazing horses and even the mountains. Travelling through this great expansive, unspoiled countryside, we discovered a remarkable landscape of sparkling rivers, gently rolling green hills, valleys and sprawling rugged golden prairies, all underneath the biggest bluest sky we’ve ever seen.


Doesn't your indoor cat also deserve a KITTY KAT KABANA for your RV?

While on our journey through Big Sky and Big Vista, we happened upon the land of Custer and Sitting Bull and the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was a lesson in American History, as to why this bloody battle took place. We listened to a story, as every minute detail was recounted. “The year was 1876, the date was June 25th and the day was Sunday, when hundreds of Indian warriors converged on a grassy ridge above the valley of Montana’s Little Bighorn River. On the ridge, five companies of the United States Cavalry, about 210 officers and troopers, fought desperately but hopelessly against many times their number. When the guns fell silent and the smoke and dust of battle lifted, no U.S. Cavalry soldier survived, hence the other name for the battle, “Custer’s Last Stand”.

All along the highway from Cody, Montana, motorcycles outnumbered all other vehicles travelling on the road at least twenty to one. We later learned that where we were headed, was the very same place they were headed. For 51 weeks a year, the small neatly groomed town of Sturgis, South Dakota with its stately elms, population 7,000, where the weekly newspaper still prints a column about who visited whom for Sunday supper, is unhurried and serene. However, for one full week, it swells to over 500,000 (the same population as the entire state) as bikers from all over the world converge for the world’s biggest motorcycle rally. They come on Harleys by the thousands, choppers, motocross rigs, and glitzy touring cycles. Among the beards, tattoos and fringed tank tops are movie stars, policemen, housewives and even preachers. We have never seen so much highly polished chrome, black studded saddle bags, jackets, knee-high boots and chaps in one place in all our life.

Despite the constant throb of a motorcycle engines everywhere we went, South Dakota was way beyond our expectations. Our second day was spent in the Black Hills, which is derived from the Lakota word “Paha Sapa”, meaning, “hills that are black”. It was in those hills that a sculptor by the name of Gutzon Borglum got his inspiration for a Mountain Carving that we know as Mount Rushmore. It took four- hundred men and women to create Mount Rushmore, Conditions were harsh from blazing hot to bitter cold and windy. Carvers climbed 700 stairs to the top of the mountain to begin their work day. The job was dangerous, as 90% of the mountain was carved using dynamite. The powdermen cut and set charges of dynamite, of specific sizes, to remove precise amounts of rock. After the blasting, they drilled holes in the granite close together, called honeycombing, to weaken the granite so it could be removed easily with a chisel. After the honeycombing, they smoothed out the surface with a bumper tool. The four presidents forever immortalized in stone are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. To give you an inkling of the immense magnitude of these carvings, the following are some dimensions of Washington’s head; Forehead to chin-60 feet, width of eyes – 11 feet, length of nose – 20 feet, width of mouth – 18 feet.

Then on to another larger than life mountain carving, this one is of a Native American Indian named Crazy Horse. In 1947, sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski accepted a commission from the Sioux, to carve a likeness of their hero on Thunderhead Mountain in their sacred Black Hills. “My fellow chiefs and I,” wrote Standing Bear, “would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes, too.” The artist Ziolkowski died in 1982; with luck, his great-great-grandchildren will live long enough to dedicate the finished sculpture. Unlike Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse is being sculpted in the round. The finished creation, depicting a mounted Crazy Horse pointing to the surrounding land to indicate “my lands are where my dead lie buried”, will stand 563' tall.

“A Nuclear-missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing, just one or two acres of ground with a concrete slab in the middle and some posts and poles sticking up behind an eight-foot Cyclone fence; but to the imagination, it is the end of the world” – wrote Ian Frazier, Great Plains, 1989. Just recently the base has been opened to tours by the National Parks service and being in the area, we took the opportunity to see firsthand the behind the scenes remnants of the Cold War, when the U.S.S.R. was threatening the world with dominance. At that time in history, the U.S., fearing a preemptive strike and only having the old liquid filled missiles which took 1 ½ times longer to fill than it did for a Soviet missile to wipe them out, had to come up with a solution. This inadequacy, lead to the development of the Minuteman Missile that could be ready on a moment’s notice or whenever the commander and Chief gave the green light. This situation of U.S.S.R. knowing that they would also be destroyed, created a deterrent called M.A.D. (Mutual assured destruction). M.A.D continues to work today, as most sane nations know that an attack on the U.S. means their own destruction. This base was decommissioned in 1993 and the U.S/ U.S.S.R treaty allowed both sides to keep one silo and one launch control chamber for educational and historical purposes.

We spent the afternoon in the Badlands and even before I got home to my laptop, I tried to put into words, my feelings of being in this strange and mysterious land. But, I cannot do it justice. Therefore, I will quote other writers as to their impressions: Freeman Tilden, who describes the region as “peaks and valleys of delicately banded colours – colours that shine in the sunshine . . . and a thousand tints that colour charts do not show. In the early morning and evening, when shadows are cast upon the infinite peaks or on a bright moon-lit night when the whole region seems part of another world, the Badlands will be an experience not easily forgotten.” Thaddeus Culbertson wrote: “Fancy yourself on the hottest day in the summer in the hottest spot of such a place without water – without an animal and scarce an insect astir – without a single flower to speak pleasant things to and you will have some idea of the utter loneness of the Bad Lands.” Or, as Frank Lloyd White wrote, “I was totally unprepared for that revelation called the Bad Lands . . . . What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere – a distant architecture, ethereal . . . , an endless supernatural world more spiritual than earth but created out of it”

Stay tuned as we take you to Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri

K&G, somewhere on the road