Crazy Horse, Mammoth Site and Denver, Co.

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

This morning we packed up our things, loaded the car and headed to Crazy Horse.  I remember seeing Crazy Horse when I was little but did not remember any of the story.  It is an amazing story, dream and sculpture that they are carving into the mountain.  The Lakota tribe asked Korczak Ziolkowski to create a memorial for their people in order to remember their heritage.  The first blast occurred in June, 1948.  The dream has continued on down to his children (there were 10 kids) and it is financed solely by private  enterprise and they have  twice turned down federal funding.  The monument is incredibly HUGE!  It will be 641 feet long and 563 feet high.  You could place 4 of Mt. Rushmores carvings in Crazy Horse's head along.  It was fun to see someones dream coming true and incredible to see how he started and all that he had to do.  It was not as easy to blast and work on the mountain as it is now and it is not easy now!

Next we headed south to the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, SD.   A bone was discovered while bulldozing an area to prepare for a development.  After investigating, they discovered it was the bone from a Mammoth and they later found that it had been a pool which held about 60 Mammoths (all of them younger males).  The males are often ousted from the herd and probably had been traveling on their own, fell into the pool and were unable to climb back out.  They also found in the pool short-face bear (which can stand up to 15 feet tall), deer, coyote and other animals.  We were able to walk all around the dig site and see the actually bones that they were working on.  The head paleontologist was there overseeing some work done by a group from Earth Watch.

listening to the tour through
use of phones

Annika holding a
mammoth's thighbone

After our time here, we headed south to Denver, CO.  It was about a 5 1/2 hour drive.  We drove quite a ways through Wyoming.  It was beautiful but the people who say that Iowa is flat have just not gone far enough to Wyoming.  It was flat, no people, houses, animals or cell service,   I kept wondering where all the people were and then we figured it has the smallest population of all 50 states.  Please people, no more jokes about how flat Iowa is....there are just no people to see how flat it is in Wyoming :)  We arrived in Denver, Co. about 8:30pm and spent the night at a nice Holiday Inn Express.  Of course, we had to take a midnight swim and then fell into bed happy and sleepy.  At least we don't have to worry about the kids not falling asleep quickly.