Mount Rushmore

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is the colossal sculpture of four U.S. presidents - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln - carved into a granite cliff in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Each face stands about 60 feet tall, blasted and chiseled from the pale stone between 1927 and 1941 under sculptor Gutzon Borglum, and the memorial has become one of the most recognized symbols of the United States.

The site sits high in the Black Hills, an isolated, pine-dark mountain island rising from the northern Great Plains and considered sacred by the Lakota, for whom the range is the Paha Sapa. The hard, fine-grained granite was chosen because it erodes only an inch every ten thousand years, meaning the faces will outlast almost any other human work. Nearby, the even larger Crazy Horse Memorial has been under construction since 1948.