As Close As You're Legally Allowed to Get: A Visitor's Guide to Mount Rushmore
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 and shifting to 8 p.m. for the rest of the season — worth timing your visit around if you want to catch it, since the schedule moves earlier as summer winds down.
Presidential Trail
Take the trail to the right and you'll reach the Sculptor's Studio, where Borglum kept his working model and once monitored the carving's progress from a distance. Regular ranger talks happen here through the summer, covering both the carving techniques used on the mountain and Borglum's own history — check the posted schedule at the Information Center or Visitor Center when you arrive, since times shift throughout the season.
Keep following the trail and you'll get close-up vantage points of each president, with a few optional stairs along the way — 422 of them, if you start the loop from the Sculptor's Studio, across the trail's 0.6-mile paved route. Consider that your fair warning. This is about as close as you're legally allowed to get to four presidents' faces without a very different kind of vacation story.
Wrap-Up
Congratulations, you've seen everything. Yep, that's right — if you take your time, the whole visit can eat two or three hours, easy. From here, we'd recommend checking out one of the many other great spots in the Black Hills, and maybe even swinging by Crazy Horse to honor the Native American presence on this land and see a sculpture still being carved in real time. We didn't make it out there ourselves, but it's on the list for next time — right alongside actually giving Custer State Park the time it deserves, which is exactly where we're headed next on this blog: the animal drive loop, and whatever decides to stand in the middle of the road.
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