Mt. Rushmore: America's best tourist trap?

USA TODAY Travel asked editors at The Huffington Post to share some of the site's top travel stories this week. Here are their picks:

Mt. Rushmore: America's best tourist trap? : The placards in the on-site museum aren't afraid to admit it: South Dakota's state historian Doane Robinson constructed a massive series of sculptures into the granite of the Black Hills with the express goal of luring more tourists to this lonely corner of the country. Today, the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt proudly survey the Black Hills. They appear on license plates across the state, tagged with the line "Great Faces, Great Places." They're even referenced on the flag, which bears the official motto of South Dakota: "The Mount Rushmore State."

Roughly three million people a year visit the sculpture. Most come during the summer. That means the best time to see this creative, inspiring, elegant and controversial work is in the off season, when, according to one park ranger, visitor figures drop from an average of 5,000 a day to about 100 a day.

Yellowstone in winter : America's oldest park goes white: Deep winter is not the time most visitors think of coming to America's first national park, where an annual snowfall of 600 inches is not unusual, but it is absolutely the best time to experience the breath-taking amount of wildlife that has come to earn the title, The Serengeti of North America. Over sixty different animals are represented within the 2.7 million acres including 3,000 bison, 15,000 mule deer, 600 grizz, over 300 grey wolves, 15-22,000 elk that winter over in the park and on and on. Many come down from high elevation and yard up in the meadows, pawing the ground for food or even getting fed by the park service, making it much easier to view them.

Traveling in search of the world's best meals : There are many reasons to travel, be it short or long term. It provides you with a unique vantage point to experience the world and helps keep your own life in perspective. There are memorable sights to be seen, new friendships to be made and many modes of transportation to help you get from A to B, usually with a chicken or two along the way. Of all the reasons to travel, I never thought food would be at the top of my list, but that's firmly where it is today. I plan my itinerary for my tastebuds, for better or for worse.

A Mayan apocalypse journey into Belize : Modern Belize is small enough that passengers on my Belize City-bound Delta flight spent nearly half an hour before takeoff figuring out how they knew each other's relations, assuming that they must. They did, but it's no surprise given that this territorially tiny country is home to about 300,000 people benignly organized into racial subsets: Taiwanese small business owners, Low German-speaking Mennonite farmers, creole-slinging slave descendants. This file-folder diversity is charming, but it is also the result of a great homogenous loss. Before the Spanish explored Belize and the English colonized the Mosquito Coast with a rash of mahogany camps, roughly twice as many people lived here as do today. They were Mayan, and this was arguably the heart of their empire.