GossSquatch Outdoor Adventures

Custer State Park is famous for two things: the Cathedral Spires along the Needles Highway , and the animal drive. We already covered Needles Highway back when we promised we'd circle back to the animal drive eventually — turns out "eventually" was this trip. After leaving Mount Rushmore, we took Iron Mountain Road down toward the animal drive. We came prepared for neither the amount of time this would take, nor the carrots the donkeys were expecting. Iron Mountain Road Iron Mountain Road is Needles Highway's quieter sibling — less about jaw-dropping spires, more about getting you from Mount Rushmore back to Custer State Park without adding hours to your trip. Unlike the Needles Highway, it's open year-round, and the road itself has a pedigree: Senator Peter Norbeck scouted the route on horseback in the early 1930s, personally staking out a path that engineers told him was impossible. He got the last laugh — construction ran from 1932 to 1936, and Norbeck w...

Wekiwa Springs State Park is one of our favorite local parks, and it comes with tenure — we've been going since childhood, thanks to a grandfather who lived twenty minutes away in Altamonte Springs and treated "let's go to the spring" as a legitimate substitute for supervision. The park turns out to be much bigger than the swimming hole it's famous for: it protects a solid chunk of the watershed feeding the main spring and its run. There's a second park nearby, Kelly Park (also known as Rock Springs Run), which is excellent in its own right — but that's a story for another day. History Wekiwa Springs has been pulling in visitors since the 1860s, back when it went by the less catchy name of Clay Springs. By the 1890s, someone had the very Florida idea of slapping a hotel and bathhouse on top of it and calling the water medicinal — a marketing strategy that predates Walt Disney World by more than seventy years and requires considerably less capital inves...

Today, visiting Mount Rushmore means driving into a parking garage run by a third-party concessionaire — no entrance fee to the memorial itself, but the parking fee will run you $10 a vehicle. From there you'll walk past the gift shop (of course) and down the Avenue of Flags : 56 of them, one for every state, territory, and commonwealth in the country, which is either patriotic or just an extremely long walk to the bathroom, depending on your mood that day. The avenue leads to the Grand View Terrace , stadium seating, and the Lincoln Borglum Visitor Center , which houses a museum and a roughly 14-minute film covering the memorial's history and construction. At dusk, the park runs its Evening Lighting Ceremony — a 10-minute ranger talk, a separate 20-minute film, and a veterans' honor ceremony , all building up to the moment the four faces get lit up against the night sky. It runs nightly from late May through the end of September, starting at 9 p.m. through August 10 an...

Welcome to GossSquatch Outdoor Adventures . Home base is central Florida, where we've got everything from theme parks to beaches to the occasional cave. We'll keep chasing the out-of-state series, but I'll be sprinkling in some Florida adventures too. Welcome to the wild side. About Me We know a little about me already, but where'd the sense of adventure actually start? I grew up in the Green Swamp on 5.5 acres, about 4 of which were untouched (mostly) wild swamp. I spent my days exploring the woods, climbing trees, and occasionally swimming with the snakes and gators in the ditch out front and out back. You can see where some of my crazier ideas come from. Then in elementary school, a guy in a tan uniform showed up talking about the wonders of Cub Scouts . My dad was a scout growing up, so he jumped on it, and our pack was born. He and three other dads talked to the local elementary school and the scouting executive, and together they founded a pack that grew into...

Mount Rushmore is one of those stops every American studied in a textbook at some point, usually right before falling asleep on it. In person, it's a different story — genuinely impressive, genuinely strange, and carrying a lot more baggage than the postcards let on, including a betrayal of the Lakota people that the gift shop does not mention. If four presidents carved into a mountain isn't quite your thing, there's a second monument close by: Crazy Horse , still being carved today, funded entirely by private donations instead of taxpayer money. We didn't have time for both. It's on the list for next time, right next to "spend more than four hours in Custer State Park." History The Black Hills of South Dakota are worth seeing on their own merits, which is presumably why Doane Robinson looked at them and thought: what if we put our historic presidents' faces on the rocks. The concept was simple — leave behind a legacy that lasts for years. That l...