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Tags: road trip
Published : 4 months, 3 weeks ago (Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:19:31 PDT)
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Day ? I've lost count... 12 July
Hello All! Up with the birds, or at least the early bird neighbors, this morning and all packed and on the road by 7:30 on our way to drive the Needles Highway and the Iron Mountain Highway. Another name for them is the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway.
They weren’t kidding about the scenic either. It doesn’t look like that long of a drive, but it took us 3 hours because we kept stopping to take pictures or gawk at everything. We saw a variety of wildlife too, but missed out on the buffalo – the ranger at the entrance gate said they were in a different section of the park that day. The main attraction of the 66 mile drive is the tunnels you drive through, and the pigtail bridges, which are found on the slightly shorter 59 mile route, bypassing the southern loop. This part of the drive is the most fun, because in some places the road turns back on itself (the pigtail bridges) and in others the hairpins are so tight they recommend you take them at 10 mph. Not to mention the variety of wildlife that might be along the road.
 
A guide book I found explains a little about the area: “Near the geographic center of the continent, the Black Hills rise 4,000 feet above the high northern grasslands, like an ‘island in the plains.’ At 7242 feet, Harney Peak is the highest point east of the Rocky Mountain chain and west of the Spanish Pyrenees.
 The Black Hills are the eroded remnants of a mountainous dome formed when younger sedimentary material was bowed upward by molten stone intruding from below. Lakota people sometimes refer to this igneous rock as ‘Inyan, the Stone Nation.’ Inyan is prominent in their origin story, whereby the Great Spirit gives movement to the Stone Nation People.
Ninety percent of the area is cloaked in ponderosa pine, decorated with ribbons of aspen, birch, bur oak, spruce, and willow. The oldest and largest pines are called ‘yellow barks,’ because of the tint they take on in maturity.” Here’s the story behind the road – it sounds like Norbeck was either an idiot, or a genius: “In 1919, the route that Norbeck mapped out was, to conventional engineering standards, impossible to build. But Norbeck was an unconventional man, and was not deterred by the ‘diploma boys’ who said it couldn’t be done. When he asked his engineer, Scovell Johnson, if it would be possible to build, Scovell replied, ‘If you can supply me with enough dynamite!’ And so Norbeck did.
  Two years and 150,000 pounds of dynamite later, the result was a winding road around and through the upthrust sentinels of stone – The Needles Highway. The new signs directing visitors to this work of art read ‘Needless Highway.’ Johnson wasted no time in scraping off the offending last ‘s’ with his pocketknife.
 
   The Needles Highway was good training ground for Norbeck’s next venture – the Iron Mountain Road. Norbeck mapped out a route that required three tunnels to be blasted through the mountains. In addition, the tunnels were to frame the four faces emerging from Mt. Rushmore in the distance. But that was the easy part.
Norbeck asked the Superintendant of Custer State Park, C.C. Gideon, to design the road that would connect the tunnels. Gideon devised a remarkable corkscrew spiral road connecting the tunnels to lift the traveler from one level to another without adding miles of road. Gideon (who quit school at age 13) referred to them as ‘spiral-jump offs.’ Norbeck call them ‘whirly jigs.’ Today they are known as the Pigtail Bridges.
Custer State Park Superintendent Owen Mann built the road in about a year and a half with the help of 16 men, finishing in 1933.” A warning sign is posted at the beginning of the Needles Highway: “Busses, RVs, and trailers may find it difficult or impossible to negotiate the hairpin turns and tunnels of the byway.” They weren’t kidding, as the scrape marks on some of the rocks attest.
 
We stopped at Mt Rushmore, and asked why the flag was flying at half mast. The ranger said that a soldier from South Dakota had died in Iraq, and they were honoring him. I think its appropriate for the flag to fly half mast in this location, since all the men honored on the mountain fought for their country.
The rest of our trip was pretty uneventful, except for the odd place we stopped at for lunch. We kept seeing signs advertising Wall Drug, and all the odd things that were there, including a 6 ft tall rabbit, a Mt. Rushmore replica, life sized bucking horse, giant jacklope replica, shooting gallery, life sized animated T-Rex, and buffalo burgers.
We decided to stop by and check out what all the fuss was about. What a zoo! It was wall to wall people, enough stuff to choke a souvenir junky. The Buffalo burger was…mediocre at best, and didn’t taste any different than beef. Oh well, at least we saw what all the fuss and multi-state advertising signs was about. The story about the origin of the mega-store-amusement park was interesting at least. Seems in 1931 (in the midst of the depression) Ted Hustead and his wife Dorothy bought the drug store in a small town. None of their customers had any money, so they weren’t getting rich, and they’d sit and watch the cars pass by the city of Wall on the highway without stopping. One hot July, a few years after they’d moved to Wall, Dorothy thought up the idea of putting signs along the highway like the old Burma Shave signs, offering a free drink of ice water to anyone who stopped. Ted was skeptical, but by the time he’d finished putting up the signs, there were people lining up for ice water. As time went on, other attractions were added to the store, and the current mega-store-amusement arcade evolved. I’ve heard that there are signs advertising Wall Drug all over the world, proof of which I saw on a wall in the main part of the store. People have put up signs of their own, and taken pictures to send back to friends in the US.
 
We’re camping at Newton Hills State Park, just south of Sioux Falls, South Dakota tonight. It’s been a REALLY long day.
 Cheers Jenine |
