800 Million Pounds of Stone

• Over 800 million pounds of stone were removed from the mountain during the carving of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Borglum and his crew used dynamite to blast away portions of the granite.
  
  

Scale

• Each face on Mount Rushmore is "as tall as the entire Great Sphinx of Egypt," and the faces are scaled to men "who would stand 465 feet tall," according to Mountrushmore.info.
  
  

Workers

• Borglum's crew had to walk up 506 steps each day to the work site at the top of the mountain. They were then suspended by cables, which allowed them to work on the faces.
  
  

First Jefferson Carving

• After working on the face of Thomas Jefferson for two years, Borglum found that the granite was cracked, and the first Jefferson face "had to be blasted off the mountain," according to NPS.gov.
  
  

Enduring Monument

• The granite of Mount Rushmore, already some of the oldest rock in the western United States, is expected to erode by only one inch in 10,000 years.