Day 2 - Crazy Horse

Well, this was a fun but long day. Dallas is doing all the driving and she is doing great will all the skinny roads and windiness of the roads. Anyone that knows me well and has traveled with me knows that after I started driving that I get "sea sick" in the car if I am not the driver. I was very proud of my body I didn't feel sick until 10 hours into the day on the most curvy road to that point. It was about 6:50 and we hadn't eaten dinner yet so my body said it was done, but we made it.

The day was packed with fun. We started at Crazy Horse Memorial - wow - that memorial is huge, it has also taken forever to carve and they are still carving. To give you an idea of how large it really is here are some stats (look at the pictures below) the head is 87.5 feet tall or 9 stories high, where the feathers will be (behind the head) is 44 ft long, the whole thing is 563 ft high, the arm is 263 feet long, the horses head is 219 feet . Hundreds of thousands of pounds of granite have been blown off (with dynamite) or carved away from the hillside. It is pretty impressive. The Lakota Chiefs asked a sculptor by the name of Korczak Ziolkowski to take on the project and he dedicated his life to it. 7 of his 10 children still work on the project and so do his grandchildren. There has never been federal money used to crave the granite only donations of time, money, equipment and gifts (to sell in the gift shop). There is also a museum of Native Americans, a self guided tour of the sculptors home and studio, a area where they teach about Native American crafts, a restaurant and more. It is pretty impressive. I know that Mama had mentioned that it wasn't all that much but there has been a lot more accomplished since she was here 36 years ago. Crazy Horse was a war chief that was killed while under the white flag of a truce. The Lakota people wanted to honor him and all Native American by making the memorial. Someday will will be done - probably not in my lifetime is my guess.

This is the model that was used to figure out exact measurements for the actual memorial, the sculptor's take the dimension from the model and multiple it by 12 to give what needed to be done up on the hillside. K.Z. first worked alone by hand and then eventually received donations that allowed him more equipment and laborers.

This is inside the museum, there is a bronze statue of what the finished product will look like in front of the actual craved hillside.