The Crazy Horse Memorial is a mountain monument under construction on privately held land in the Black Hills, in Crazy Horse, South Dakota. It will depict the Oglala Lakota warrior, Crazy Horse, riding a horse and pointing into the distance. The memorial was commissioned by Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, to be sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski. It is operated by the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit organization.
The memorial master plan includes the mountain carving monument, an Indian Museum of North America, and a Native American Cultural Center. The monument is being carved out of Thunderhead Mountain, on land considered sacred by some Oglala Lakota. The monument has been in progress since 1948 and is far from completion.
Mount Rushmore National Memorial is centered on a colossal sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills in Keystone, South Dakota. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum created the sculpture’s design and oversaw the project’s execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son Lincoln Borglum. The sculpture features the 60-foot heads of Presidents George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), as recommended by Borglum. The memorial park covers 1,278 acres and the actual mountain has an elevation of 5,725 feet. There was strong opposition from the Lakota (Sioux), who consider the Black Hills to be sacred ground, the land was stolen from the Indians when the treaty was broken after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills. The mountain into which it was carved is known to the Lakota Sioux as Six Grandfathers. If you can look past the crimes against the Lakota People and Borglum’s white supremacist leanings it is an impressive sculpture.
An interesting side note was one of my visits to Mount Rushmore came towards the end of a months long road trip to Alaska which included visits to the Canadian Rocky Parks, Glacier National Park and Yellowstone. All during the trip we were doing game drives and blind observations to observe animals. We had seen wolves, grizzly & black bear, dall and bighorn sheep, elk, moose, etc. The one animal We had yet to see was a Rocky Mountain Goat. Luckily we saw one on our visit to Rushmore.
Jewel Cave National Monument contains Jewel Cave, currently the third longest cave in the world, with 200.3 miles of mapped passageways. Frank and Albert Michaud, two local prospectors, discovered the cave in 1900, when they felt cold air blowing out of a small hole in a canyon. The hole was too small for a person to enter so the brothers dynamited the entrance to make it bigger. They found a cavern lined with calcite crystals naming it “Jewel Cave”. Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Jewel Cave National Monument in 1908. Access to the cave can be reached now via an elevator as well as a cave tour by foot. There are also three surface trails.
Wall Drug Store, often called simply Wall Drug, is a roadside attraction and tourist stop located in the town of Wall, South Dakota, adjacent to Badlands National Park. If you are driving west from points east you will see billboards all along the way touting this roadside attraction. Evidence of a different kind of tourism from years ago the family road trip.
When you arrive in the town of Wall, Wall Drug consists of a collection of cowboy-themed stores, including a drug store, gift shop, several restaurants, and various other stores, as well as an art gallery and an 80-foot brontosaurus sculpture.
