The Road Engineers Said Couldn't Be Built — A Dying Senator Built It Anyway

When construction began on Mount Rushmore in 1927, state engineers wanted the fastest, cheapest road possible connecting it to Custer State Park — a direct route around the roughest terrain of South Dakota's Black Hills. Senator Peter Norbeck refused. Already in declining health, he personally staked out an alternate route on foot and horseback, insisting on a road built specifically to slow drivers down: 314 curves, narrow single-lane stone tunnels aligned to frame Mount Rushmore's granite faces, and three wooden pigtail bridges that spiral the road back over itself. This video tells the story of Iron Mountain Road — the highway a dying senator fought his own state's engineers to build, and why, nearly a century later, it still hasn't been widened, straightened, or modernized into anything faster.