Iron Mountain Road and the Pigtail Bridges
Of all the deliberate, theatrical roads in the Black Hills, none stages its scenery quite like Iron Mountain Road. The route, which runs between Custer State Park and the approach to Mount Rushmore, was laid out so that a driver rounding a curve or emerging from a tunnel would suddenly find the carved presidential faces framed in the opening ahead, distant and small in their setting of granite and pine. The effect is no accident. The road was designed to produce it.
The mind behind that design was Peter Norbeck, the South Dakota governor and senator who shaped so much of the scenic Black Hills. Norbeck believed a mountain road should reveal the country and lead the eye, and on Iron Mountain Road he pushed that philosophy to its limit. He is credited with insisting that the tunnels be aimed at Mount Rushmore so that the monument would appear, perfectly composed, in the rock-framed view beyond. The road was built in the early 1930s, during the years the faces themselves were being carved, and the alignment was chosen with that growing monument in mind.
Tunnels and pigtails
Two features give the road its character. The first is the set of one-lane tunnels blasted through solid granite, narrow and rough-walled, each cut at an angle that opens onto a particular view. Drivers slow and sometimes wait their turn to pass through, and on the far side the landscape arranges itself, on the famous occasions with the four faces hanging in the distance like a picture set in stone.
The second feature is the pigtail bridges, an engineering solution as elegant as it is unusual. To lose elevation quickly on steep terrain without long switchbacks scarring the hillside, the builders looped the roadway over itself in tight wooden spirals, so the road crosses above its own path on curving timber trestles. A vehicle descending a pigtail bridge corkscrews down through the trees, the grade managed in a compact, almost playful coil. The wooden structures suit the forest in a way concrete never would, and they have become emblems of the route.
The whole road is slow and intricate, full of sharp curves and tight clearances, and like the other Norbeck highways it is built to be experienced rather than merely traveled. A driver in a hurry will find it maddening. A driver willing to slow down will find one surprise after another, the views opening and closing, the road folding over itself, the monument appearing and vanishing in the tunnel mouths.
A piece of a larger vision
Iron Mountain Road does not stand alone. It is one segment of the network of scenic drives Norbeck championed across the central Hills, a network that includes the granite-threading Needles Highway and the roads of the state park, all of them built on the conviction that the landscape deserved roads worthy of it. Together they turned the act of driving through the Black Hills into one of the region’s defining attractions.
That achievement carries the same complications as everything built in this country. The roads frame and celebrate Mount Rushmore, a monument carved into mountains the Lakota hold sacred and that were taken in violation of treaty. The scenery these highways reveal is contested ground, and a clear account of them does not pretend otherwise. The artistry of the engineering and the weight of that history occupy the same miles of pavement.
For Rapid City, the gateway through which most visitors enter the Hills, Iron Mountain Road has long been part of the standard circuit, the loop of monuments and scenery that gives travelers a reason to base themselves in the city and fan out into the country around it. Nearly a century after it was built, the road still performs its old trick. It carries people through the granite, slows them with its loops and tunnels, and then, at just the right moment, presents them with the faces on the mountain, exactly as its builder intended.