Mt. Rushmore National Park By elkper on Feb 02, 2008 - Updated Sep 18, 2011

Mt. Rushmore National Park is about 30 miles from Rapid City South Dakota. It is an excellent way to help children learn about the 4 Presidents that are in the monument. While Mt. Rushmore is free to get in, you do have to pay for parking and I highly recommend renting the wand to learn more details as you walk around the park. The wand is set up so that you enter a number corresponding to a location in the park. It then tells you some more details about the history. There are sections that have recordings of people involved in building the monument. The park also has a museum that allows you to go through at your own pace and learn more about how the location was picked and how the monument was carved into the side of the mountain. When you get around to the studio there is a park ranger that shows you the tools and how they were used for carving. He talks about how many people were injured working on it, how many people worked on it and he also shows pictures taken during construction. The food in the park is good and fairly reasonably priced for what you get. There are many hotels in Rapid City, but not that many in Keystone which is right next to Mt. Rushmore. This is a great place to go to get a bit of education snuck into your vacation.