Caves, Crazy Horse, Custer, and Carved Faces

Days 14-15--We didn't make it to Custer State Park on Monday, as we had planned. We made two unscheduled stops instead.

The first was to Jewel Cave National Monument, where Bas descended 730 steps into the cave, the third-longest cave in the world. I, who tend to be a bit claustrophobic, settled for the non-strenuous tour into the first room of the cave. 

Later, as we drove into the town of Custer, we decided to explore the Crazy Horse Monument site. When the monument is completed, it will be the largest sculpture in the world. After 50 years of work, sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski and his team have completed only the profile of Chief Crazy Horse.

The vision of this man and his family of ten children is remarkable. The sheer size of the undertaking is almost unimaginable. A video indicated that the size of all four faces at Mount Rushmore combined are equal in size to part of the head of Chief Crazy Horse.  But, there's a huge amount of work to do. At the current pace, this project may take another 100 years to complete.

On Tuesday morning we woke up to a western blue-sky day and headed to the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, where the sun shone on the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln. It is an amazing and beautiful sculpture created by Gutzon Borglum, who was gifted with the same vision, determination, and creative spirit that characterized Ziolkowski, the artist who started the Chief Crazy Horse project. 

Before we left the memorial, I needed to complete the picture with the face of another visionary president.

In nearby Custer State Park we drove the Iron Mountain Road.

Don't know what a pigtail is? Neither did we. It is actually a bridge that loops back over its own road, like a spiral. This creates a switchback that allows the road to climb rapidly up a steep hillside.

And the tunnels? They are one-lane tunnels, some so narrow that we had to fold in our side-view mirrors in order to pass through. The tunnels were carved out of granite through the mountain. The narrowest tunnel was 8'4" wide, and the lowest tunnel was 10'7" high.

The Needles Highway winds through a spectacular drive several miles long through tall, granite formations that look like needles stretching into the air. Many of these "needles" are hundreds of feet high.

The park is also home to wildlife. We saw several dozen pronghorns, some burros, and several hundred buffalo, one of whom obliged us and lumbered alongside our van.

Later in the evening we drove the Wildlife Loop again and watched an entire herd of buffalo move across the road in front of us to a different pasture.

Finally, we met two different groups of Dutch-speaking people today and stopped to share a few stories. Bas held his own with his Dutch-language skills. Then in the afternoon, at an overlook in Custer State Park, a man asked us where we were from, what Bas did there, etc.  One thing led to another, and we learned he is a Christian dentist who wants to do dental mission work. Bas, of course, could talk with him about that. We also learned that he and his wife had lived in Wheaton, where his wife had grown up next door to Ken and Margaret Taylor, the founders of Tyndale House Publishers, where Lynn worked as an editor for many years. The wife worked for IFMA, a mission organization that used to be right around the corner from where Bas and I worked when we lived in Wheaton. It is amazing to us that we continue to have these unexpected contacts with so many interesting people on this journey.

Next stop, Badlands National Park.