Mount Rushmore: Sixty-Foot Presidents in the Black Hills

The four faces are 18 metres tall each, and you don’t really grasp the scale until you’re standing on the Presidential Trail and your field of vision narrows to just Lincoln’s left nostril. Gutzon Borglum dynamited 450,000 tons of granite to make this happen, starting in 1927 and running until 1941, the year he died. His son Lincoln finished it. The project was largely funded through federal appropriations during the Depression, which is either a triumph of New Deal public works thinking or an irredeemable act on sacred Lakota land, depending on your starting point. Both things are true simultaneously, and the best version of a visit here reckon with that.

The Black Hills are Paha Sapa to the Lakota, guaranteed to them by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Gold was discovered in 1874. The treaty was broken. The four faces blasted into the landscape are a useful symbol of exactly that history, which makes standing there more complicated than the postcards suggest. This is a monument worth seeing, and visiting it honestly means sitting with some discomfort alongside the genuine spectacle.

The Monument

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is in Keystone, South Dakota, 38km southwest of Rapid City. There is no admission fee to the site. Vehicle parking costs $10 per vehicle, and the pass is valid for one year, so keep it if you’re continuing through the Black Hills. The parking structure fills by mid-morning in summer; arrive before 09:00 to avoid delays.

The Presidential Trail is 0.8km through the viewing area and around toward the base of the mountain. The views improve as you walk; the composition of all four faces together is best from the central viewing terrace. The trail takes 30-45 minutes but most people spend longer. The faces are genuinely more impressive up close than in photographs, which tend to flatten the sense of depth and the sheer mass of the carved granite.

The Lincoln Borglum Visitor Center has a solid exhibition on the carving process, the technical challenges of working at altitude with dynamite and pneumatic drills, and some of the political history of the project. The film shown in the information centre is worth sitting through.

The evening lighting ceremony, nightly at 21:00 in summer, floodlights the faces against a dark sky. Former military personnel living in the area participate in lowering the American flag. The ceremony is patriotic in tone; it is also genuinely well done, and the illuminated faces at night are a different and better version of the spectacle than the flat midday light most day visitors get.

The Crazy Horse Memorial

You must visit the Crazy Horse Memorial 27km away. Not as an obligation but because it recontextualises everything else you see in the Black Hills, and skipping it is the kind of decision you regret.

The Ziolkowski family has been carving Korczak Ziolkowski’s vision into a separate Black Hills mountain since 1948, funded entirely without federal money, on land they own, at the request of Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear. The face of Crazy Horse, completed in 1998, stands 87 feet high, noticeably taller than any of the four Rushmore presidents. By 2025, crews were actively carving the horse’s mane and Crazy Horse’s right shoulder, using modern equipment that moves nearly seven times faster than the pace used at Rushmore, suggesting the final sculpture (641 feet long, 563 feet high) may be realistically completable within decades rather than centuries. The arm, outstretched and pointing, will be 263 feet long.

Entry is $15 per adult, $13 per child. The interpretation at the site covers the Lakota perspective on the Black Hills in depth and without simplification.

Staying in the Area

Rapid City, 38km northeast, is the practical base for the Black Hills. The Hotel Alex Johnson, downtown Rapid City, dates from 1928 and is the most distinctive accommodation in the area, with doubles from around $160/night. Budget options cluster on the main commercial strip at $70-100/night.

Keystone, immediately below the monument, has numerous hotels and motels at standard Black Hills rates ($100-200/night in summer). Staying in Keystone means you can walk to the memorial gates before the day-trippers from Rapid City arrive.

Getting There

There is no public transport to Mount Rushmore. A car is required. From Rapid City, take Highway 16A through Custer State Park rather than the main highway. This route passes through hand-carved tunnels that frame the monument as you approach, a deliberate design feature, and the park itself is excellent. Bison roam Custer State Park, and they will stop traffic without warning. Do not leave your vehicle when bison are nearby; they are considerably more dangerous than they look.

For 2026, Mount Rushmore is planning a special fireworks display on July 3 as part of the United States’ 250th anniversary celebrations, the first fireworks at the site since 2020. If that timing works, it’s worth building a trip around.