The folks over at the National Park Service’s PR department like to send me their news updates, which comes in pretty handy. I like to travel, especially to national parks, so it’s nice to keep up with what’s going on around the country. And since there are six national parks, monuments and memorials in the Black Hills and Badlands region, I usually get some good local updates.

Take their latest park news. According to the NPS ParkTips page, Mount Rushmore nabbed a national award for its new audio tour. Visitors have the option of buying the tour when they enter the memorial. If you can part with $5, you’re given a slender plastic stick sporting a small speaker and a keypad. You tote around the stick (the National Park service uses the slightly-more-elegant “wand,” but let’s call a spade a spade), and when you come to a sign with a number on it – usually placed at historical points-of-interest – you punch the number into the stick. Pretty soon you’ve got a pleasant voice from the stick explaining what important place you’re standing near.

These types of tours have gotten pretty popular over the past couple of years, so the Mount Rushmore audio tour must be pretty good to have distinguished itself. The NPS says that the tour includes historic recordings from the Borglum family and mountain carvers, which certainly seems like a plus to me. Here’s the release from the NPS:

(South Dakota) — The National Association for Interpretation (NAI) recently named Mount Rushmore National Memorial’s audio tour as the winner of their audio division 2007 Interpretive Media Awards. Mount Rushmore Audio Tour: A Living Memorial incorporates a lightweight handheld wand which features narration, music, interviews, sound effects and historic recordings of sculptor Gutzon Borglum, Lincoln Borglum, Mary Ellis Borglum Vhay, Native Americans and several Mount Rushmore workers. The tour is available for $5, inclusive of sales tax, in the Audio Tour Building and the Mount Rushmore History Association Bookstore in the Information Center.

So has anyone gotten the chance to hear the tour yet?