Our first stop this afternoon, rather excitedly, was at Mount Rushmore. I had, naturally, been rather looking forward to this for some time as it's one of those things that people think of as soon as you mention the United States - along with the Statue of Liberty and Apple Pie. In the end, it was a bit of a disappointment, to be honest, but then most things are after you've seen them in close up on television and depicted on postcards everywhere you look across America. On TV, the carved heads of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt up on the mountainside always look huge and impressive - and now that I actually have a decent camera which can zoom in on things more than ten feet away, I can see why. When you see photos or film of the monument, the photographer has clearly either been in a plane or standing where we were and zooming in with a long lens so that you can see every tiny detail of the really quite astounding carvings. However, from the viewing platform at the end of a ridiculously patriotic wooden boardwalk with flags waving in the wind along the length of both sides, the heads on the mountain appear to be about as far away as the Hollywood sign is from street level in Los Angeles. I walked all the way to the furthest point on the boardwalk in order to get as close as I possibly could, and looked at it through the shiny new long lens on my camera, but it still looked somehow distant compared to what I had been expecting. In my mind, I had pictured being able to stand right in front of it, reach out and pick Washington's nose - but it was not to be.

I was infinitely more impressed, to be honest, with our final stop of the day. Not to be outdone, the native American peoples of the region decided back in 1939 that they had to have a monument of their own, and that it had to be better than neighbouring Mount Rushmore. Writing a letter to one of the sculptors who had worked on America's great monument, Chief Henry Standing Bear made it clear in no uncertain terms that he would really like to see the figure of Crazy Horse, one of their great heroes, carved out of Thunderhead mountain - oh, and it would also be quite cool if he was depicted sitting on a horse and pointing off at some unknown object on the horizon. The sculptor, one Korczak Ziolkowski, probably thought somebody was playing a practical joke on him, but after ten years of getting all the details sorted out he finally started work on the project. The incredible thing is that there has never been any scheduled completion date for the monument, nor has there ever really been any money available to fund such an endeavour. The US government has offered several million dollars on more than one occasion, but the money has always been turned down on the basis that government involvement may be at odds with this being a native American project. The head of Crazy horse was only completed in 1998 - and the rest, although you can see the shape and tell what it is supposed to be, is clearly a long way from being finished. Lack of funds makes the project a very slow one, and visitors to the Crazy Horse cultural centre usually resort to standing behind a conveniently placed statue of what the monument will eventually look like and lining it up with the distant carving on Thunderhead mountain to create an idea of what it's going to be.

Nevertheless, you really do have to have a huge amount of respect for a project on such a vast scale which gets no money from the government - when the Crazy Horse monument is finally completed, probably well after most of us are dead and buried, the native Americans will have something to truly call their own. Apart from the whole bloody country, of course, but let's not get too political here.

The Crazy Horse cultural centre shows a video in which the last thirty years of work are chronicled, work which mainly seems to consist of people sticking great chunks of dynamite into holes in the rock face and attempting to climb to safety as fast as they can before being buried under a shower of debris. As you watch the video, you can see Crazy Horse's face being blown into shape bit by bit, and then the top of the arm taking shape with the help of a handy archway in the mountain. What makes this all even more incredible is that nobody actually knows what Crazy Horse looked like - he hated having his photograph taken, probably because such a thing required standing still for hours on end in those days, and he insisted on being buried somewhere where nobody would ever find him. The monument, therefore, is something of a symbolic attempt to show the way people imagine Crazy Horse to have been. There is a fantastic wooden building at the centre containing a museum and gift shop, and it is almost entirely with the profits of these that the project is able to move forward. However you look at it, and however long it takes to complete, the Crazy Horse monument really is going to upstage Mount Rushmore, even if the government hastily adds a few more president's heads.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.