We learned that there are several caves and caverns in the Black Hills.  We visited two of them, the first is Wind Cave (look for a post with pictures of the second one shortly).  It’s the first cave that became a National Park, back in 1905 and contains a huge area of land around the cave itself so that the forests and hills are protected.

There is a herd of bison in the national park, as well as lots of deer, antelope, and long-horn sheep.  We didn’t see many animals while driving to the cave though 🙁

But, the cave itself is interesting.  As with most of the caves in this area, there are very few stalagmites and stalactites due to a low amount of water seeping into the caves.  There are, however, formations called boxworks which were formed when carbolic acid (the mixture of water and CO2) seeped through the ground containing a mixture of fossilized sea creatures and gypsum, dissolving the fossils but was not acidy enough to dissolve the gypsum, so you’re left with lacy, spiderwebby looking formations.  Here is one picture of the boxworks:

And, here are more pictures of the cave:

There is a second huge stone monument in the process of being built in the Black Hills not too far from Mr. Rushmore.  It’s a memorial to Crazy Horse, a Lakota Sioux indian chief who refused to sign a treaty and move his people to a reservation and was stabbed in the back by a soldier while under a flag of truce when he was only 35 years old.

When the American Indians in this area learned about Mt. Rushmore they wanted to have a monument as well, to honor one of their heroes.  They asked a sculptor who had won some national awards to come and build it.  He started it in the 1940s and it’s still only partially done because it’s being done with NO federal money – it’s all donations!

The sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, first did a small sculpture, similar to how Mt. Rushmore was done, and then used it as a scale to calculate where each section of the mountain needed to be blasted and shaped.

Here is the Crazy Horse memorial with Mt. Rushmore alongside the head of Crazy Horse.  This is close to actual scale of the two monuments!  This shows how HUGE the Crazy Horse memorial will be when completed.

This next picture shows the small sculpture next to the mountain, to show what it will look like when completed:

And here’s a picture showing the mountain that is being carved:

While in South Dakota, we drove to Mt. Rushmore.  I always thought Mt. Rushmore was right next to the town of Sturgis, SD because I’d seen a commercial for the motorcycle rally that showed the main street of Sturgis and Mt. Rushmore was right there big as life.

Well, that was incorrect!  Mt. Rushmore is almost an hour from Sturgis and is way out in the middle of the Black Hills area.  Beautiful country though!  The road we took was very winding and narrow and had several places where the road actually looped around itself to gain height up/down the mountain!  Also, there were some tunnels that were one-lane…you drove to the entrance, stopped and looked and honked, and if nobody was coming you could go through the tunnel.  Interesting!!

Mt. Rushmore itself is very impressive!  It was built during the depression and created jobs for a lot of men.  There were several setbacks during the construction, one of which was a crack in the rock that required the face of Washington be shifted a bit in the middle of making it so the crack wouldn’t cause his nose to fall off (yipes!)

The visitors area is impressive – you park and walk up some stairs and through a sort of gateway and then – there it is!  Several people would just stop in their tracks right there to take a picture, so you have to watch where you’re going to avoid bumping into them LOL

Here are pictures we took of the mountain: