Mammoth Dig Site
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As the hole filled with dirt and other sediments,
the bones were covered. It was discovered when a contractor was preparing
the land for some new houses in the 1970's.
Today the site has been covered by a protective building and the digging slowly continues. This hole contains a very large collection of mixed-up prehistoric mammal fossils. You can even volunteer to dig each July. |
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One stop in the park was for a quick visit with some of the Park's wild burros. Tame in demeanor -- wild in the sense of on their own. They are descendants of burros left behind decades ago.
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Yet another Junior Ranger Patch! |
This project was started in 1949 by Korczak Ziolkowski.
Korczak was an orphan at age one, was self taught, never took an
art class, but won first prize in art at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair.
"My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes too", wrote Chief Henry Standing Bear when he invited Korczak to the Black Hills and asked him to memorialize their great chief in stone. |
He was a strong believer in the free enterprise system. He felt that Crazy Horse should be a nonprofit, educational and cultural project built by interested citizens and not the taxpayer. Twice he turned down ten million dollars in federal funding. He knew at the onset that this project was greater than one man so he laid plans and sculpted scale models for others to continue the project.
Here's a picture of one kids driving a load a souvenir
blast rocks to the visitor center. Seven of his children and his
wife, Ruth, are working on the monument today.
Korczak died in 1982 at the age of 72. He is buried in front of the Crazy Horse Monument. |
If you look carefully at this picture below the head,
you can see a white trace in the rock. This is where the head of
the horse will be in years to come. Today blasting is taking place
to remove the stone above and in front of what will be the horse's head.
Early Monday morning we were at our trailer with a clear sight of the monument. We heard a blast, looked up and saw the debris and dust from a blast on the mountain. |
When completed the monument will look like the 1/300th
scale model carved in white marble.
Korczak Ziolkowski, his wife and several of his children
have dedicated their lives to this project. I was touched by seeing
this.
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The Black Hills are filled with caves. Jewel Cave
is the third largest cave in the world with more than 100 miles of passage.
Each year several more miles of new cave are charted.
Since the cave is not well lit pictures did not turn out well enough for display on the web. |
COCOA Yes, for everybody that asks, she's well, doing fine -- and still loves tennis balls more than anything else. |
As the old Indian story goes -- One day six children were playing near the river when one of them suddenly turned into a huge bear. The other terrified children ran away and climbed to the top of a large stump. The bear chased them to the stump and scratched to get up to the top. As the bear got closer to the children, the stump grew and grew. The bear continued to scratch to the top until finally the children on the top were saved by becoming the stars of the Big Dipper. |
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