04-May-2024 Wind Cave National Park and Crazy Horse Memorial

It’s 05.04.2024 - May the force be with you! 😁

Today was a very busy day - it started with a 9AM tour at Wind Cave National Park, then I explored the a above ground areas at WCNP, next I headed to the Crazy Horse Memorial and after a final (secret) stop I finally made it back to my hotel until 10pm. It’s a busy life on the road!

Those of you who have been following along with my blog have seen plenty of pictures of caves and bison so I thought I’d make today’s cover something new and different: Crazy Horse National Memorial:

But let’s start at the beginning …. First stop of the day was Wind Cave National Park. I asked the Ranger when I first arrived what distinguishes Wind Cave from some of the other National Park caves I have seen and he said it features the world’s largest concentration of rare “boxwork” formations. Boxwork Is a collection of very thin calcite fins that look like honeycombs that are typically on the ceilings of caves - apparently this is one of the few caves in the world that has this special feature. We walked about a mile through very narrow passageways and it’s interesting to be in a cave, but this one did not have any WOW factors like stalactites or stalagmites or huge caverns or colorful deposits … so I will put it in the “average” category. Those of you who have read my blog posts about other caves probably have seen and heard enough of caves so let’s move on.

Although wind cave was donewhet disappointing underground, it was spectacular above ground! As I drove through this National Park there were lots of huge bison everywhere - I finally found bison in the wild!!!! They grazed right up to the side of the road and didn’t mind if you slowed down and took pictures. Those are some big creatures! I had to laugh when at one point I had pulled over to watch a big bull and he decided to cross the street right in front of my car. Nature is awesome! Apparently all the bulls are in the southwest part of the park and the females with their new calves are up in the northeastern part. The road became a dirt road as I got to the NE area of the park, and the mothers and babies were protected behind a very large fence. The babies are adorable - some have lots of energy and just jump and frolic around.

Wind Cave National Park also has tens of thousands of prairie dogs. For those readers unfamiliar with prairie dogs, they are like cute weasels that each have their own little hole and live in communities of hundreds of other prairie dogs with interconnected tunnels. Each one guards their own hole and if you come too close they first chatter and send out the alarm and then they’ll hide in their holes. The landscape is pock-marked with so many prairie dog holes and there are even some holes in the middle of the road. I had to pay attention as I was dodging both bison and prairie dogs throughout the park. 😂

After my bison exploration I found a hiking trail up to an old fire tower that had some great views out over the grasslands. Learned that the area used to be more grass and less trees but due to fire suppression over the last century trees have encroached. It’s a bit troublesome because the trees use more water than the grasslands so the national park service now has a program of controlled burns to help manage the grasslands. It seems you can see incredibly far, sns according to an informational sign it explains that the views here are great because the air quality is some of the best in the nation. No pollution or particulates just endless grasslands - beautiful!

My next stop was at Crazy Horse Memorial. Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski was a self taught and renowned sculptor who gained recognition at the 1939 World’s Fair. He was asked by Chief Henry Standing Bear to come to the Black Hills of South Dakota to carve Crazy Horse into the mountainside. It is a work in progress - work was begun in 1948 and last year there was a 75th anniversary celebration. My tour guide estimated it will likely take another 40 years to complete.

The finished sculpture will look like the scale model below and will have Crazy horse pointing towards the “ lands where my dead are buried” . The sculptor decided he would not accept any federal funding so the project has proceeded solely with donations. These days there are 18 full-time Workers, 10 of whom are sculptors, 2 of whom are the original sculptor’s grandsons. 

Once complete, it will be the largest sculpture in the world. They only used dynamite to blast a few areas at the very beginning of the project and everything else is proceeding via handtools as they are concerned that dynamite would potentially ruin the stability of the base.

Curiously, it is very close to Mount Rushmore, and there is some controversy between whether we should honor our Founding Fathers or our Native Americans. Crazy Horse was killed by being stabbed in the back by a federal soldier back in 1877, and as a result the crazy horse foundation has refused all federal funds ... hence the slow progress!

The statistics of Crazy Horse are interesting – crazy horse’s face is 87 feet high and the faces on Mount Rushmore are only 60 feet high!

Mount Rushmore was my next stop and the reason that I got back to my hotel so late - I wanted to see it at dusk and illuminated at night time …. I’ll tell you all about it after my daytime visit to Mount Rushmore tomorrow.