FACES OF SOUTH DAKOTA

 

 We visited Chief Crazy Horse while we were in South Dakota  last month.  I wrote about this favorite place after the third time we were there in  June, 2008.  The massive monument has been a work in progress since 1948.      

Click here to  link to my earlier post, which tells more of the story and here to visit the  official Crazy Horse website.  

 

 It was very cold and icy this time.   I took the above picture through a window inside the visitor center.

The view below is from my 2008 archives and it was taken from the outside deck.  A scale model of what the finished statue will look like stands at the edge with the statue beyond.  This time, the scale model had been put away out of the weather and the porch was slick with frost.

  

 

 The sculptors are focusing now on the horse's head and the hand.   It was a little difficult to see what progress has been made over the past five years.   It is slow going and I doubt if we'll ever see it completed.  

Finished or not, I still find the stories of Crazy Horse and of the sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, fascinating.    Korczak died in 1982 but he left detailed plans for the rest of the work.  His widow Ruth and seven of his twelve children are still directly involved in the project which receives no public funding.

 We paid our brief respects to the Chief on our way to spend time in beautiful Custer State Park (shown in several previous posts).    We had decided not to go to Mount Rushmore, which is in the same area.   We'd seen it before and so had Geoff (and we knew it hadn't changed). 

 

But we were in for a surprise.    After we explored Custer Park, we decided to take the "long-cut" back to our Rapid City motel by driving the scenic Peter Norbeck National Scenic Byway.    

As we drove along admiring the Black Hills in the distance, we suddenly realized we were looking at Mount Rushmore from the "backdoor."  

There were no signs here pointing to the monument (and no background information about it's history or meaning).    But we thought it was actually more fun to discover this "secret" viewpoint for ourselves than it had been to go in at the front door in earlier years.  

Click here for the link to the National Park Service official Mt. Rushmore website.

 

Here is a view of these four famous faces with a close-up lens:

 

 

 Linking this last view of our roadtrip visit to South Dakota with OUR WORLD.   

Thanks to Lady Fi and the team.