Needles Highway, Custer State Park Wildlife Loop, and Iron Mountain Road are all connected and one blends into the other.
We stopped at a rest area and took a picture of this board explaining the building and reason behind building the highways through this area. Hope you can enlarge it if you want to. It took a whole lot of dynamite to blast those tunnels through the solid granite mountain and to make the roadway for that many miles. The sign above says ten years and 150,000 pounds of dynamite.
We couldn’t stop along the Iron Mountain Road so we didn’t get very good pictures. But here is what we have.
That’s Mt. Rushmore in the distance with the light behind the Presidents.
This is a picture we tried to take of the postcard we sent to some of you. It shows the tunnel with the road coming out of the mountain into a canyon which is very steep and narrow but some cleaver guy figured out how to build a road through there anyway. The bridges you see are called pigtail bridges because they curl around and pass over the previous curl. It was really interesting driving these curls. Then, to make it even better, there were tunnels to drive through and as we drove through a tunnel and looked straight ahead, we could see Mt. Rushmore framed in the end of the tunnel.
Sorry, but that’s the extent of our pictures taken along Iron Mountain Road. By this time, Bob’s eyes were beginning to cross from all the winding, narrow roads, hairpin curves and slow progress we had that day. We were tired and hungry.
We had planned to go on to Crazy Horse Memorial that day but it meant many more miles on the same kind of roads to get there. By this time it was well into evening so we just drove to Keystone and took the highway toward Rapid City and got on the freeway and headed home. We got home just as it was getting dark. So, Crazy Horse will just have to get along without us gazing upon his unfinished memorial. Bob was not about to drive the Needles Highway again to get there, even on another day.
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