Day 18 – Wheat Ridge, CO to Crazy Horse Memorial, SD to Wind Cave National Park, SD

Miles driven today: 426 Cumulative miles: 4054 We had planned to get up around 7:30am so we could say goodbye to Amanda before she left for work (Dave had the day off) and get an early start, but Amanda knocked on the door about that time to let us know she wasn’t feeling well enough to go into work in the morning. So, we slept in until 9:00am. When we got up, we finished packing and hung out for a while. We left their place about 11:00am, made a couple of wrong turns due bad signage, and finally got on the right direction. We made a couple stops for gas, bathrooms, a food stop, and a Love’s stop for Robertson’s Jerky (the only place I know to find it and we don’t have any Love’s close to us). We spent six and a half hours driving today. It sounds bad, but it really wasn’t. Good music, good company, and a good car I think made the time pass fast. Daniel thinks that me driving instead of him (so he can download pictures or read or whatever) has something to do with it. Almost as soon as we got into Wyoming, we started seeing antelope. When we got into Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, we drove past a huge herd of bison, we saw deer at the campground, and we also had to wait for the wild turkeys to get off the road so we could go by. We got to our campsite at 5:45pm and by 6:00pm we had the tent and sleeping bags all set up. We left the campground to drive up to Crazy Horse Memorial. On the way there, we had 14 wild turkeys cross the road in front of us. We arrived at Crazy Horse at 6:45pm. The stone carving is still in progress. Carving began in 1948 with a crew of one, Korczak Ziolkowski – he has since passed away and seven of his ten children and his wife continue to work on Crazy Horse. Korczak, who was an assistant sculptor on Mt. Rushmore previously, was asked by Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear to carve their great hero into the Black Hills as well. Korczak agreed and believed the public should choose to pay for this on thief own accord. He twice turned down large sums of government funds and the project continues to be funded solely by donations and contributions (including equipment and dynamite). There has been a lot of progress since I last saw Crazy Horse Memorial (in 1994). As I recall, they had a rough outline of Crazy Horse’s face and arm blasted out and his horse’s face painted on the rocks. Now, the face has been completed and further progress has been made in removing rock around the arm and horse. When the memorial is completed, it will stand 563 feet tall and 641 feet long. For perspective, Mt. Rushmore faces are 60 feet tall, the Statue of Liberty is 306 feet tall from the bottom of the pedestal to the top of the torch, the Washington Monument is 555 feet tall, and the St. Louis Arch is 630 feet tall. There is also no estimated completion date for the Crazy Horse Memorial as this is dependent upon donations and the challenges of the project. We took some time to photograph Crazy Horse before daylight faded and browsed the exhibits. About 8:15pm, they lit up the carving from below. A half hour later, the laser light show, “Legends In Light,” began. We watched from the deck of the Welcome Complex facilities where there was an audio presentation to accompany the laser light show. I set my camera up on a mini tripod during the show and took about 90 pictures (it’s digital, so it’s free and easy to delete). A significant number of them actually turned out good. Being on a tripod, I was able to take pictures and watch the show at the same time. The show lasted about 25 minutes. It was dry but pretty cold (there were small amounts of snow on the ground there) when we left at 9:30pm. We got back to the campsite at 10:15pm and cooked dinner. We ate in the car since it was so cold out. Our digital thermometer said it was 42 degrees outside. We let it adjust again when we got in the tent – it said it was 48 degrees. Fortunately Daniel brought both our light weight backpacking sleeping bags and our heavier weight camping sleeping bags (one is good down to 30 degrees and the other to -10 degrees). Daniel read and I wrote while we listed to the elk bugling before we finally managed to fall asleep. Wildlife seen: antelope, bison, prairie dogs, turkeys, mule deer, camels (in a fenced field)