South Dakota

I spent about eight days going through the Rapid City area parks. I could have spent two months if I wanted to do all the parks and history locations.

The park is 240,000 acres! Around 75 million years ago this whole are was covered by a shallow sea. In today's Badlands the bottom of that sea appears as a grayish-black sedimentary rock called the Pierre shale. This layer is very rich in fossils.

Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt an Abraham Lincoln are carved into the solid white granite of the South Dakota Black Hills.

The faces are 60 feet high and were carved by Gutzon Borglum. This portion took 14 years to carve. The remaining work on the lower part of the busts has remained uncompleted.

The idea of the Crazy Horse came about after the US Goverment announced the sculpting of Mt. Rushmore. In 1940 sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski visited with Chief Henry Standing Bear to discuss the sculpting of Crazy Horse. The carving is in the round, consuming the 563-foot-high granite mountain.

This is the back view. The first blast happened on June 3, 1948.

The face of Crazy Horse is 90 feet high. Mt. Rushmore is 60 ft. high. At this point, I am standing on the outstretched arm of Crazy Horse.

The surface of the face was torched smooth with a one-of-a-kind torch system which heats up to 3,400 degrees. Please notice all the magnificent detail in the face.