Does That Make Me Crazy

Right near Mount Rushmore (learn more about our visit here), there’s another mountain someone was crazy enough to carve. This one isn’t quite done yet and quite honestly, it’ll be a whole different world population before it is finished. Korczak Ziolkowski, the sculptor, began creating Crazy Horse back in the 1940s. Him and his wife had 10 kids and most of them are all still part of Crazy Horse today. They run different parts of the nonprofit connected to Crazy Horse and even continue to help with the sculpting.

Crazy Horse is a monumental area dedicated to Lakota Chief Crazy Horse. The area is complete with the Indian Museum of North America, an area full of historically preserved Native American artifacts. By the time this monument is complete, it will be the largest monument in the world. Crazy Horse’s face alone is over 90 feet tall compared to the 60 feet of Mount Rushmore. As of 2017, they estimate it will take at least 10 years to complete their current focus, the pointing fingers of the Crazy Horse monument. The below is what the entire finished monument will look like with what it currently looks like off in the distance.

Twice a year, they do a Night Blast and we happened to be in town the week they were doing this. Each year on June 26, they do a Night Blast in memory of Ruth, the wife of the sculptor and mother to the children still running the Crazy Horse monument. They do an explosion for each year of Ruth’s life. She passed away in 2014, but she would have been 91 this year. It is amazing to see how they set off dynamite to form granite into the shape of things like a person’s face.

We visited at night for the blast so the pictures aren’t fantastic. I took video too, but the iPhone just isn’t powerful enough to focus during dark explosions off in the distance, but you can at least see the flames and hear the explosions!