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COPYRIGHT 2006 Smithsonian Institution
BLAME IT ON CARY GRANT. The climactic chase in Hitchcock's 1959 thriller North by Northwest, in which he and Eva Marie Saint are pursued by foreign spies around the faces of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt, is what fixed the idea in tourists' imaginations. Today the first question out of many visitors' mouths is not why, or even how, Mount Rushmore was carved, but can they climb it. Actually, it's not such a far-fetched question. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum's 1935 conception for the monument called for a grand public stairway leading from the base of the mountain to a hall of records, behind the presidential heads. But when the artist ran out of quality granite, and the project ran out of money, the plan was shelved. Climbing on the memorial has been officially prohibited since work ended there in 1941. In fact, even Hitchcock had to shoot his famous chase scene on a replica built in a Hollywood studio.
Which is why a special invitation from the park superintendent to "summit" Mount Rushmore is not something one can easily turn down. Early one morning, I and several other lucky hikers silently followed park ranger Darrin Oestmann on a trail through a sweetly scented ponderosa forest in the Black Hills of South Dakota, listening to birdsong and the cracking of twigs from passing goats. Scattered along the path were rusting nails, wires and lengths of air compression pipes, all left by the 400 or so local laborers who from 1927 to 1941 followed this very route, by wooden stairs, on their Promethean task.
Oestmann paused to point out a rarely glimpsed view of George Washington's profile, gleaming in the morning light. Mount Rushmore has not looked so good in more than six decades. This past summer, the four presidents were given a high-tech face-lift; they were blasted with 150-degree water under with pressure. Sixty-four years' worth of dirt and lichens fell from the memorial. "Now the faces are whiter and a lot shinier," said Oestmann, who helped clean "about three quarters of the first president. You see that dot in Washington's left eyelid?" He pointed to a broken drill bit stuck in the stone. "You could hardly see that before."
About ten minutes later, we scrambled up a few steep boulders and squeezed through pine branches, then passed beyond a high-security fence. Near-vertical metal steps took us into a granite crevice that runs behind the presidential heads--an oblong sliver, looking like the secret entrance to a pharaoh's tomb. This, we are told, is the Hall of Records, the vault Borglum envisioned. The hall was to be a...
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