Once you're in Nebraska, take Highway 71 north – you'll be driving along this highway until you leave Nebraska and are well into South Dakota.ĭrive through Nebraska National Forest, and then Oglala National Grassland at the border with SD. Continue east on the Interstate-80 past Curt Gowdy State Park, Soapstone Prairie Natural Area, and the massive Pawnee National Grassland. Drive past Lake Granby onto Highway 125, right by Rocky Mountain National Park.Īs you enter Wyoming, follow the highway through the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge and exit the string of parks through Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest. After getting on the US 40, make a sharp right turn and go north along the Front Range of the Southern Rocky Mountains. Take Interstate 70 west through Lakewood, passing by Windy Saddle Park, Matthews Winter Park, Clear Creek Canyon Park, and Golden Gate Canyon State Park. The Golden Gate Canyon State Park offers a cozy peaceful drive with its scenic roadside view. You'll definitely need to stop along the way, but there'll be no shortage of great places to do so, and you won't feel like you've wasted your day, like you would if you were to go by plane. Besides, if you spend several days exploring along the way, you won't really feel the added mileage at all.īy adding a few hours to your travel time and incorporating Colorado's national parks and forests into your trip, you can make the drive infinitely more scenic and memorable. With that said, we'd strongly advise against a one-day trip – leaving Denver via Interstate 25 and continuing north can actually get you to Mount Rushmore in about 6 hours if you're aiming for speed, but the route we recommend gives you a lot more to look at along the way.

After all, with iconic facilities like the Presidential Trail and Lincoln Borglum Museum, there's plenty to see and do at Mount Rushmore and the surrounding areas. If you take off very early, it's possible to make the trip in one day. The route we've laid out for your road trip from Denver to Mount Rushmore is about 580 miles in length, and the drive will take around 10 hours without accounting for stops. How far is Mount Rushmore from Denver and how long will the road trip take? To help you plan out this route, read on below and familiarize yourself with some of the key stops along the way. The drive itself is around 10 hours without any stops or detours, and it's packed with beautiful views and scenery. Using our recommended route, the road trip from Denver to Mount Rushmore would take up a whole day, or potentially more if you want to see everything along the way. With that said, there's a great route that passes through some beautiful places in the state of Colorado and beyond, and these locations can really help you make an adventure out of this trip. A road trip from Denver to Mount Rushmore may seem like an unconventional one – the quickest possible routes aren't particularly scenic, and you can easily catch a flight to South Dakota if you want to get there quickly.

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