The real Mount Rushmore. A GPS glitch is sending travelers looking for the famous monument down a gravel road miles away from the site.
A GPS glitch is sending sightseers looking for the national monument down a gravel road deep into the hills of South Dakota.
Jim Holland of the Rapid City Journal reports that it is most often up to Ashley Wilsey, a manager at a camp, to inform lost-looking travelers of their mistakes:
She encounters a steady stream of Mount Rushmore-seeking tourists being mistakenly directed to the camp by Global Positioning Satellite mapping technology.
Wilsey said that off-and-on for five years, a specific Google Maps glitch has misled tourists trying to get to Mount Rushmore.
It appears that travelers who type "Mount Rushmore, SD" into their GPS - rather than "Mount Rushmore National Monument" - are directed to a hill somewhere near the camp, about 13 miles from the real Mount Rushmore and well into the woods.
Wilsey told the Rapid City Journal that she has even seen tourists exit their vehicles and begin hiking around in search of the monument.
The camp has since erected a small, blue and white sign: "Your GPS is WRONG. This is NOT Mt. Rushmore. Go back to HWY 16. Take a right. Follow signs to Keystone."
Google Maps
Travelers looking for Mt. Rushmore are instead directed to a small camp operated by the United Methodist Church.