So, there we were, our map spread out over the bed, our route planned out to the south through another highly educational national park and to the north east the Beartooth Highway,  recently introduced to us and reputedly the best motorcycle road in America. It would be nice  to say we agonised over the decision but that was never going to happen. We put on our cheeky grins, drew another line on the map heading generally east and two days later blasted out of Cooke City heading toward the Beartooth with a full tank of pent up energy.
 
In the crisp early morning, with little traffic and crystal blue sky the Beartooth was one of the  great motorcycle rides. It wasn't as epic as we had found some Alps roads and perhaps not as exotic as some of the mountain roads in Morocco, but as mountain roads go it was world  class and all class. We swept up to the base of the climb through long miles of rolling bends. As we started to climb the switchbacks towards the pass, I looked up and could see a tiny  figure on the mountain wearing a red jacket.

“There might be somewhere to take a special photo up there,” I said.
“Hope so,” came the response, “this is spectacular!”

We have had a lot of practice on mountain roads and we made the best of it that day, drifting deep into the corners, turning late and hard then driving out with the engine pulling like two bastards in the middle of the power band. It is the stuff that bike riders live for and by the time we stopped at the crest for a photo I had the fixed grin of a loon. The red jacketed figure we  had seen on the ascent was still there when we pulled up at the crest. He walked over and  spoke to us as soon as we had stopped the engine.

“I've just been standing here listening to you come up the hill,” he said, “beautiful!” He walked  off without saying anything more but he had already made the Elephant's day.

Further to the east we stayed in Sturgis, that town in the Black Hills of South Dakota where the annual motorcycle rally draws hundreds of thousands of bikes and riders. We have never  been interested in the rally. In a place where chrome-shiny Harleys and leather chaps are the  ideal, Team Elephant just doesn't cut it. Despite this, Sturgis has a small but worthy  motorcycle museum with a couple of quality exhibits that made the visit worthwhile.

South from Sturgis the Black Hills had some fair quality motorcycle roads including the Needles Highway and of course, the major attraction, Mount Rushmore with its oversized carving of four US presidents. We visited, along with the daily throng, and found plenty of  interest. The carvings are like impressive monuments to the dead everywhere. They say everything about the people who built them and almost nothing about the complex nature of the subjects. Much more interesting to me was the museum which related the story of the marathon construction and a little about the workers, many of them miners, who did the painstaking excavation of many thousands of tons of granite with remarkable precision. I felt  good about these heroic men and it was pleasing to see their names recorded in bronze on a  wall.

When I first looked at the mountain I couldn't help but see the scree of rubble excavated from the carving fanning out below the heads. Before the museum visit I had thought it lent an  unfinished air to the site but after, I saw it in a new light. It was almost as though it was a  plinth supporting the great men and allowing them to be seen by the world. I pointed it out to Jo.

“Maybe this is the important national monument. The Rushmore Workers Memorial Scree Slope.”

With that small sedition we scurried back to Elephant, loaded up and headed east across the very aptly named Badlands and on into the American heartland, into the corn fields and into a  different America.