I had three destinations in mind for my day in the Black Hills region of South Dakota: Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse memorial, and Wind Cave National Park. I successfully made it to all three places, then drove about three and a half hours to Cheyenne, Wyoming where I spent Friday night.
Mount Rushmore
This American staple has all the trappings of a tourist gimmick. Indeed, that is what it was envisioned as when it was first conceived by a South Dakota historian with the guidance of sculptor Gutzon Borglum in the 1920s
The blasting and carving to make the mountain look as it does today took from 1927 to 1941, and technically was never finished. In the Borglum's original vision, the president's full torso's would also have been carved in the mountain. Also interesting: an unsuccessful attempt was made in 1937 to have Susan B. Anthony's likeness added to the monument.
While Mount Rushmore is impressive for its novelty and symbolism, the six story tall heads took up less of the mountain than I imagined before seeing them in person. The Black Hills in their natural beauty provide a big portion of Keystone, South Dakota's draw. The sturdy pines and shadowy peaks have an old world feel about them and made me think of Grimm Brothers fairy tales.
Though overrun with tourists young and old, the wooden pathways and stairs leading from one view from which to ogle at the presidents' great, stony faces to another offers an undeniably American experience.
Crazy Horse
Of all the sites I saw on Friday, the Crazy Horse memorial has the most curious backstory behind it. In 1929, Lakota elder Sitting Bear met with sculptor Korczak (pronounced "Core-zack") Ziolkowski and requested that he build a memorial to honor Native Americans. Almost single-handedly initially, and then with the help of his family, Korczak agreed to take the project on.
The memorial is privately owned by the Ziolkowski family thanks to gifts from neighbors and land swaps with the government. It's construction is funded entirely by donations. According to the video shown at the visitor center, Korczak, who had worked for one year on Mount Rushmore and saw the impermanence of government funding, turned down offers of $10 million in federal assistance on two occasions.
Standing 563 feet tall, Crazy Horse will be the world's largest sculpture when finished, surpassing The Motherland Calls. Korczak worked on shaping the mountain alone for the first ten years (beginning in 1948), and was eventually aided in this effort by his wife and eleven children. Today, his wife still lives on the property and one of his sons is the project's foreman. Only ten people are actively working on the mountain at present.
At to the information desk, I asked a kindly, seventy-something volunteer named Helen (a 3D artist herself--she takes 2D images and adds another dimension with layers of cardboard) when the monument was going to be finished. She said it is the most commonly asked question, and there's no answer. Many variables--from funding to weather to technological advances--impact how much progress is made on the carving so it could be 50 year, 100 years, or never.
The construction team is also learning as they go. For example, it took nine months to carve one eye, but only nine weeks to carve the second because of learning best practices. Technological advances also informed engineers that it would not be possible to have Crazy Horse's finger pointing because the extended digit would crack off due to the weight of the granite.
Once entering the site, visitors can buy a ticket for a short bus ride to the base of the memorial. I wasn't sure if this was necessary but because the timing worked out splendidly (I got there just as the bus was about to pull away), I did it. It was well worth the extra four dollars. I learned from Crazy Frank, our spirited, mustached bus driver, that depending on the weather and the angle of the sun the Indian chief's mood changes from anger to sadness to resolve.
Korczak's depiction is particularly impressive because Crazy Horse refused to ever be photographed and was buried in a hidden grave. Nevertheless, those who knew Crazy Horse have applauded the likeness. And accurate or not the solemn face of Crazy Horse peeking from the mountain warrants mindfulness of who he was and why he has that pained expression.
Wind Cave National Park
It's not just the peaks of the Black Hills that dazzle, deep underground Wind Cave, believed to be the world's fourth largest cave, boasts an equally spectacular array of rock formations. These formations weren't carved with dynamite or human hands but rather with eons of torturous interaction between water and stone
Boxwork and other strange wonders line the cave's 138 miles of known passages confined in a single square mile. And this is just the part of Wind Cave that has been explored. Barometric readings suggest that only as much as five to fifteen percent of the cave's total volume has been seen by humans.
Wind Cave is most famous for its boxwork formations. The cave's limestone 200 feet underground formed 300 million years ago from the shells and skeletons of tiny sea creatures. Gypsum seeped in and, when the gypsum expanded, cracked the limestone. Over millenniums, carbonic acid dissolved away the limestone but the calcite formed by the chemical reaction between the acid and the gypsum left behind solid, honeycombed patterns.
Our guide compared the geologic process to building a brick house out of sugar cubes and then dissolving the sugar cubs with water. The mortar that is left behind would be comparable to the boxwork.
Early Wind Cave explorers dubbed these forms "boxwork" because to them they looked like post office boxes. Most in our tour group seemed to think this was a weak naming effort. There was a consensus that "spiderwork" or "dragonwingwork" would have been more fitting. 95% of the world's known boxworks formations are in Wind Cave. It is actually pretty awe-inspiring up close.
Wind Cave visitors can choose from multiple tour experiences ranging from a candlelight tour to one that involves crawling through the cave on all fours to the basic tour hitting the cave's most notable features. I opted for the vanilla Fairgrounds Tour, which gives a general overview of the cave. It's named after the chamber that early explorer Alvin McDonald called "the Fairgrounds" in his diary.
Following the elevator ride deep below ground, the highlights of this tour included boxwork, passages resembling the inside of vertebrates, and a spot where the guide turned off all the lights and let us sit in total blackness. The tour also traced some of the footprints of Alvin McDonald.
Young Alvin, credited with mapping much of the cave, left his coded initials "Z.U.Q." using candle ash in as many as 50 of the chambers that he explored. As recently as two years ago, Wind Cave rangers found a room with Alvin's initials that hadn't been seen for a century.
As our guide concluded the hour and a half tour she left us with her moment of revelation in the cave: after almost getting stuck in a squeeze six inches wide she entered a room in which never before had a human stepped foot. Inside this room, she shined her flashlight and watched a crystal brewed from millions of years of geological phenomena glimmer for the very first time. Spreading the knowledge of the cave's beauty is what will protect it, she said, for generations to come.
Wind Cave National Park
It's not just the peaks of the Black Hills that dazzle, deep underground Wind Cave, believed to be the world's fourth largest cave, boasts an equally spectacular array of rock formations. These formations weren't carved with dynamite or human hands but rather with eons of torturous interaction between water and stone
Boxwork and other strange wonders line the cave's 138 miles of known passages confined in a single square mile. And this is just the part of Wind Cave that has been explored. Barometric readings suggest that only as much as five to fifteen percent of the cave's total volume has been seen by humans.
Wind Cave is most famous for its boxwork formations. The cave's limestone 200 feet underground formed 300 million years ago from the shells and skeletons of tiny sea creatures. Gypsum seeped in and, when the gypsum expanded, cracked the limestone. Over millenniums, carbonic acid dissolved away the limestone but the calcite formed by the chemical reaction between the acid and the gypsum left behind solid, honeycombed patterns.
Our guide compared the geologic process to building a brick house out of sugar cubes and then dissolving the sugar cubs with water. The mortar that is left behind would be comparable to the boxwork.
Early Wind Cave explorers dubbed these forms "boxwork" because to them they looked like post office boxes. Most in our tour group seemed to think this was a weak naming effort. There was a consensus that "spiderwork" or "dragonwingwork" would have been more fitting. 95% of the world's known boxworks formations are in Wind Cave. It is actually pretty awe-inspiring up close.
Wind Cave visitors can choose from multiple tour experiences ranging from a candlelight tour to one that involves crawling through the cave on all fours to the basic tour hitting the cave's most notable features. I opted for the vanilla Fairgrounds Tour, which gives a general overview of the cave. It's named after the chamber that early explorer Alvin McDonald called "the Fairgrounds" in his diary.
Following the elevator ride deep below ground, the highlights of this tour included boxwork, passages resembling the inside of vertebrates, and a spot where the guide turned off all the lights and let us sit in total blackness. The tour also traced some of the footprints of Alvin McDonald.
Young Alvin, credited with mapping much of the cave, left his coded initials "Z.U.Q." using candle ash in as many as 50 of the chambers that he explored. As recently as two years ago, Wind Cave rangers found a room with Alvin's initials that hadn't been seen for a century.
As our guide concluded the hour and a half tour she left us with her moment of revelation in the cave: after almost getting stuck in a squeeze six inches wide she entered a room in which never before had a human stepped foot. Inside this room, she shined her flashlight and watched a crystal brewed from millions of years of geological phenomena glimmer for the very first time. Spreading the knowledge of the cave's beauty is what will protect it, she said, for generations to come.
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