Let us place there carved high as close to heaven as we can their faces to show posterity what manner of men they were Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and the rain alone shall wear them away GUTZON BORGLUM JULY 4 1930
The mountain is a bare massive outcropping of solid granite Ancient and very dense the stone was formed deep within the earth as a great upwelling of hot molten rock slowly cooled and crystallized Over eons as the land rose to form mountains the softer rock above and around it gradually eroded away until it was exposed about sixty million years ago Now jutting from a pine-covered ridge on the flank of Harney Peak in the rugged and scenic Black Hills of South Dakota it stands nearly six thousand feet 18,000 meters above sea level a blocky irregular flat-topped crag about one thousand feet 300 meters long and four hundred feet 120 meters wide The vertical slab of its southeastern face forms a cliff three hundred feet 90 meters high On a crisp clear morning in 1885 a young lawyer from New York gazed across the valley toward that spectacular cliff
