Free Catherine Price by 101 Places Not to See Before You Die

town’s only apartment building—and home to most of Whittier’s residents
    Courtesy of the author
    Whittier does have a beautiful hiking trail and great wildlife, but be sure to time your visit well—it receives no direct sunlight from November to February and gets more than twenty feet of snow per year.

Chapter 36 Onondaga Lake
    T he 1400s were good to Onondaga Lake, a 4.6-square-mile lake that sits northwest of Syracuse, New York. Back then, it enjoyed a privileged status at the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy. Its halcyon days lasted until the nineteenth century, when it became a popular holiday destination, ringed with resorts and restaurants featuring locally caught fish. But once industrial development in Syracuse really kicked in, the lake got screwed.
    First was the sewage: as the nearby city of Syracuse grew, its planners designed its water system to discharge the city’s domestic and industrial waste directly into the lake.
    Then came the Solvay Process Company, a soda ash producer that opened on Onondaga’s western shore in 1884 and proceeded to release millions of gallons of by-products into the lake per day. That got rid of the company’s trash—but it also killed off most of the coldwater fish.
    Pollution eventually forced the resorts and beaches to close—at which point you’d think someone would have realized that using the lake as a garbage can was a bad idea. But instead, Solvay was replaced by the Allied Chemical and Dye Company, which discharged about 165,000 pounds of mercury into the water over the next fifteen years.
    Other companies followed Allied’s lead, dumping chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and chlorinated benzene into the mix.
    It was only after the Clean Water Act passed in 1972 that people started trying to clean up Onondaga. The sewage treatment plant was updated; several of the heaviest polluters were shut down. But unfortunately, these efforts came late—almost forty years later, the lake is still unsafe to swim in, and the sediments at its bottom are on the federal Superfund list. A group called the Onondaga Lake Partnership has made admirable progress toward making Onondaga Lake a safe environment for fish and other marine life. But considering the lake’s remaining problems, like large plumes of algae and overflows of untreated sewage, it’s going to be a while before you see me doing laps.

Chapter 37 Mount Rushmore
    B eautiful though it may be, South Dakota doesn’t have much in the way of manmade attractions. But what it lacks in number, it makes up in scale—the presidential portraits on Mount Rushmore, carved into the face of a mountain, are each over sixty feet tall.
    Peering out from the mountain, the oversize faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt were designed to celebrate the first 150 years of American history. With America more than 230 years old and going (relatively) strong, Mount Rushmore still draws millions of visitors per year.
    That’s the part I don’t get, because while Mount Rushmore is an impressive achievement, it’s really not that interesting. There’s no jackalope or fake Tyrannosaurus Rex (see Wall Drug, p. 42); in fact, three of the people featured in the sculpture also appear on the bills you’ll be using to pay the park entrance fee. Take into account the fact that the sculptures were carved into hills considered sacred to the Lakota Sioux, and it starts seeming less like a testament to the American spirit and more like an example of us acting like jerks.
    But what really confuses me is the lack of creativity. Unlike many other historical sites, Mount Rushmore never had a purpose besides being a tourist attraction: it was built specifically to draw visitors to South Dakota’s Black Hills. So why not spice things up a bit? Mountaineering guides could lead climbing expeditions up Thomas Jefferson’s nose. An entrepreneurial company could rig a zip line from Teddy