May 27-28 – Custer State Park – Game Lodge Campground/Legion Lake Campground

We began our second day in the Black Hills with a visit to Crazy Horse.  This huge carving was started in 1948 by Korczak Ziolkowski who was an assistant sculptor at Rushmore. The scale of the Crazy Horse monument is amazing. The Mt Rushmore sculpture is about 90 feet high whereas Crazy Horse is slated to be around 600 feet high when finished. The pace is slow going here – it took them 50 years to finish Crazy Horse’s face - because the work is being completely funded by private donations and entrance fees. They have a nice visitor’s center with an Indian museum, restaurant and a number of displays that discuss the carving. In the afternoon we headed toward Custer State Park. There is a wildlife loop drive about 18 miles long that takes you through the heart of the park’s buffalo herd. It was quite a sight to see them particularly given that it is spring and there were many newborn calves. We ended up finding an open spot at Game Lodge Campground inside the park. Interestingly the lodge next to the campground was the summer White House for Calvin Coolidge in 1927.

We met up with our friends, Chuck and Michelle Killam and their family, later in the day and all the kids got a chance to play. At night we all headed back up to Mt. Rushmore and saw the monument at night. They had a great program prior to lighting the monument where they honored all the veterans in the crowd. Great stuff. We enjoyed seeing Rushmore at night but, if you have the opportunity, I’d recommend visiting during the day for a better view of the sculpture where the details of the monument are more visible. That night we made our way back to Custer State Park where we stayed at Legion Lake Campground. We got to the campground late at night and when we woke up in the morning there were 3 massive buffalo right in the campground not 50 feet from our RV. AWESOME!! Once they moved on the kids rushed over to one of the trees they scraped against to pick up some buffalo hair to add to their collection of artifacts.

A side view of the sculpture as it stands today. See the bulldozer on the flat spot in front of the face and the excavator in the lower right corner of the picture? Yep - it's big!



A scale model of the completed sculpture




This big guy was 50' from our campspot. We just stood and watched he and his buddies quietly grazing.




Mother and newborn calf. The herd at Custer numbers about 1400.