South Dakota to the Extreme

By: PAUL SCHNEIDER

EVERYTHING may, as they say, be big in Texas, but everything is positively monumental in the southwest corner of South Dakota. The caves are unusually cavernous, the badlands and the war stories especially bad; the archaeological sites turn up mammoths. Giant faces gaze from more than one mountain. And at a new national historic site, you can descend into the launching control center for a retired Minuteman missile to plumb the eeriest depths of the cold war.

Wide open byways, both paved and graveled, will take you through this sometimes flat, sometimes mountainous, sometimes grassy, sometimes downright lunar landscape, where every crossroad seems to have a sign pointing to some outsize attraction, national monument or other officially remembered site.

Begin at Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Never mind that Teddy Roosevelt doesn't altogether fit in the group, or that the former republican solemnity of the place has been woefully squandered by the addition of imperial arches and triumphal gewgaws at the entrance. And never mind that you are re-enacting a childhood visit to the place. A visit to Abe and the boys is a fitting start to your zigzagging tour of the Black Hills and Badlands, where communal gawking and commemoration are de rigueur. When your audience with the old men of the mountain is finished, drive out into the Black Hills heading south on Route 16/385.

Mile 16: Crazy Horse Memorial Just outside Custer, appropriately, is the Crazy Horse Memorial, which when completed, its builders say, will be the largest sculpture on the planet. All of the presidential men on Rushmore would fit on the head of Crazy Horse, an Oglala Lakota chief, which has gradually been emerging from a granite mountain since 1948. The memorial already has what must be one of the world's largest interpretive centers, with all of the requisite snack and souvenir opportunities. All manner of Indian art and artifact, old and new, are represented somewhere on the grounds, including beads said to have been used by the Dutch to purchase Manhattan.

Commemorating native heroes is a just cause, and the sculpture is undeniably titanic. But the nonprofit, family-run place is somehow unnerving, as much a monument to monument makers and monument marketers as to the man who, with Sitting Bull, defeated George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn. What Crazy Horse, who never permitted a photograph of himself to be taken, would have thought of the laser shows projected on his graven image is anybody's guess, but Buffalo Bill Cody would have eaten it up.

Mile 52: Mammoth Site Even nature seems to be in the business of turning out stone memorials to fallen behemoths. South on Route 385 from Crazy Horse, in Hot Springs, a mass grave for mammoths is slowly emerging out of an ancient sink hole called the Mammoth Site. The effect is intensely sculptural: a mass of femurs and fibulas, skulls and tusks, backbones and pelvises, some just beginning to show in bas relief, some nearly freed from the surrounding matrix, some displayed behind glass. A few other animals have turned up in the hole, but it's mostly mammoths that wandered in and couldn't get out. And strangely, after more than 50 mammoths and counting, only males have been found.

Mile 70: Wind Cave Crystal lovers may prefer nearby Jewel Cave National Monument, which is one of the world's largest cavern systems, but Wind Cave is only marginally less labyrinthine, and it is where Crazy Horse and his fellow Lakota believed a trickster spirit first convinced humans into coming above ground sometime back at the beginning of the world, which seems more in keeping with your monumental mission. Take the tour that descends through the natural entrance rather than the elevator.

Back on the road, make your way northeast to Interstate 90 by a circuitous route. Travel north on Route 87 through Custer State Park and turn right on Route 16A toward Keystone, which will take you through an improbable number of hairpin turns and one-lane tunnels through turreted mountains where once upon a time there lived a boy named Rocky Raccoon. (For more of the same, check out the more crowded Route 87, a k a the Needles Highway.) From Keystone, head north to Rapid City and I-90. Drive east to Exit 131.

Mile 160: Minuteman Missile Site You need a reservation to visit the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site - open since May 2004 - because the elevator can take only six people at a time down into the fortified bunker where for decades military teams of two took 24-hour shifts waiting for the end of the world. If your tour is led by Kerry Davis, who served as a mission launching commander before joining the National Park Service, the image of the bizarre and surprisingly banal life in the belly of the doomsday machine will leave you both shaken and stirred.