The final day in Rapid City was a bit less planned, because yesterday was more full than I'd thought could be managed. That meant there was complete freedom to take a driving tour on a couple of remarkable highways/byways here in the Black Hills. The first of those was the Needles Highway, which winds up through Custer State Park and allows you to take in these beautiful mountain and hill formations. They're not called The Needles for nothing. Perhaps the most famous in here is the Cathedral Spires. This was not a great weather day, at least for sunshine as had been the case the other days thus far. So the pics are only so good.
The other byway I explored was Iron Mountain Road, which was also very cool. It is known for a couple of key features, in particular: tunnels were created to give drivers a framed view of Mount Rushmore, and engineers were then directed to create the roads that would connect them; and pigtail bridges, where the engineers created a curly-cue turn that routes the road under itself in order to navigate some of the tight topography they had to work with. I didn't get a good vantage point on the highway for photographing those, but there are cool pictures of them online.
Finally, that route did offer some great distant vista views of Mount Rushmore, and so I snagged quite a few shots of that from different overlooks.
The Hotel Alex Johnson does have a rather cool two-level rooftop bar, and that was the ending point of each day in Rapid City.
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