Rocky Mountain High - South Dakota

The morning is cloudless and already quite warm - we are sitting comfortably on our Harleys riding I 90 to Sturgis. Every July this relatively peaceful town in northwest South Dakota becomes the Mecca for thousands of Harley Davidson riders during the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. It all started in 1938, and so 2004 sees the 64^th anniversary of this world-famous event (Aug. 9-15). More than 300,000 Harley Davidson fans are drawn to this extraordinary week every year, and motel rooms are booked out years in advance. We are a week early, and, thus, Main Street lies sleepily in the hot noon sun. We stop at the Knuckle Saloon and try to imagine what this place must look like when thousands of hardy bikers celebrate the Rally. We then mount our motorbikes only to ride the short distance to the town center - up and down Main Street, high gear, 15 mph - in a week it will be difficult to ride and park on Main Street! But today we find ample space to park our bikes and then go shopping to buy some obligatory T-shirts to prove that we have been here!

Too bad that we cannot visit the Badlands, but, unfortunately, we are running out of time. We have been to lots of gorgeous places so far, have met many wonderful people, but from Sturgis on we must head back south to Denver. However, there is this gigantic monument on the way home which we do not want to miss - Mt. Rushmore National Memorial. The American sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved the heads of United States presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt (from left to right) into the granite bluff. The four presidents look out over the valley from a height of 152 m (500 ft), and each sculpture is about 20 m (about 60 ft) tall. You can admire this awsome piece of carving from the road, which we do, because we are not willing to pay $ 8 each just for the car park. Our NP passes grant us free admission to the memorial, but I don't have to be as close as to touch the presidents' ears to admire this work of art. So we wave them a jolly goodbye and turn our Harleys back onto the main road to the Crazy Horse Memorial.

Crazy Horse (1849?-1877), chief of the Oglala Sioux, offered resistance to white expansion in the western US. He became the leader of a band of Oglala and Cheyenne who refused to live on reservations. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874 and prospectors swarmed the area, Crazy Horse joined forces with Sitting Bull, a chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux, to keep their land free of occupation by white settlers. Crazy Horse and his people joined Sitting Bull in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, in which Lt. Colonel Custer and his Cavalry died. The US Army then hunted Crazy Horse until he finally surrendered in Nebraska on May 6, 1877. A few months later, while reportedly resisting confinement, he was killed by a soldier.

MS Encarta 1998; abridged

I think it is quite appropriate that not too far away from the four presidents' heads, a monument to one of the most prominent Native Americans' leaders is being carved from the mountain - Crazy Horse. His face alone is 87 ft. tall, the overall sculpture will be 563 ft. high and 641 ft. long. It was back in 1949, when sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski and his wife Ruth, invited by Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear, set out to blast and drill this memorial out of the granite rock in painful labor over many decades. Since his death in 1982, Ruth Ziolkowski, her four daughters and three sons have worked on this site.

At the entrance gate we pay our admission fee ($ 4,00) to the Crazy Horse Memorial, which is not a federal or state project, so our NP passes are not valid here. After parking our bikes, we leisurely walk through the large complex which features the Indian Museum, the Native American Cultural Center with numerous Native American art objects on display, the Crazy Horse Research Library and diverse educational programs. Native American craftswomen and -men in their traditional tribal dresses display their pieces of art, for example jewelry, and they are proud to inform visitors of their cultural heritage. I would have loved to stay longer, but we must hit the road again, because our destination for tonight is Cheyenne, which is a far cry from here.

We press the starter buttons of our HD bikes and roll off the memorial car park toward Newcastle,WY, from where we follow US 85 down south. Coming out of the cool Black Hills, it is getting hot again, but soon the sun begins to lose its power. Erhard has taken the lead, and Werner and I have to cut down on our cigarette breaks not to lose him completely. Still, there is some time to take pictures of the sun setting behind the distant Wyoming horizon. It is already quite late, though, when we roll into Cheyenne, but Papa John's Pizza treats us to some extra slices, and after a cold beer we are ready to hit the sack.

6 o'clock in the morning is quite early, but it is our final day, and we do not want to take any chances. We order huevos rancheros (eggs farmer style) for breakfast - simply delicious - then we fill up some gas and speed down I 25 to Denver. The closer we come to Denver, the denser the traffic gets, but it turns out that we have got plenty of time left. Actually, we can even do some last minute shopping before we ride back to EagleRider's to drop off the motorcycles. - Some critical European bikers keep complaining about the quality of Harley Davidson motorbikes, but after 5,500 km (about 3,420 m.) through six US states without even the slightest problem (not even oil fills), we reserve the right to form our own opinion. Sometimes it's been rough, but I would not want to miss these two fantastic weeks in the Rocky Mountains. One thing we all agree on spontaneously - if we had the choice, we would just mount our bikes and do the tour again - right away!