Once again we are up and gone early - there is no rest when there are so many great things to see and do in the Black Hills! Our first destination today is Jewel Cave National Monument. The name “Jewel” is a little misleading - we have been in caves that sparkled like diamonds, this one did not really. It was very interesting and enjoyable though. In 1900 two brothers found this cave when a burst of air spooked their horses. At first they thought they had found something valuable and filed a mining claim. Finding no valuable minerals, they instead turned the cave into a tourist attraction. The business was not a success, but the cave attracted attention and was proclaimed as part of the National Park System in 1908.
After watching an interesting movie in the Visitor’s Center, we rode an elevator down about 23 stories to the beginning of our tour.
Our Ranger guide tells us that Jewel Cave is the 2nd or 3rd longest cave in the World - it keeps changing and will likely become the 1st before too much longer. With over 140 miles of the cave already having been discovered, volunteer’s go into the unexplored parts each week spending 4 nights without any outside communications to do more mapping and charting - no thanks! She also tells us that she will make this tour from 4 to 6 times each day during the Summer - no need for a gym membership for her!
Over the course of our tour we will cover 1 ½ miles of pathways which will take 1 ¼ hours going up and down over 700 steps! We will end up at 29 stories deep and thankfully the elevator will be waiting to take us back to the top.
We see several very interesting cave formations - not too much of the normal Stalactite or Stalagmite stuff though.
We did see the longest “Cave Bacon” we have ever seen - at about 22 feet it is actually one of the longest anywhere.
The Nailhead Spar is probably this caves claim to fame. Not real exciting, but very interesting.
This is about the best of the “crystals” that we saw on this tour. This cave will not make the top of our list of caves we have toured, but it was the longest we have been in!
Our next stop was the National Museum of Wood Carving in Custer South Dakota. Thousands of life-like woodcarvings are all brought to life by one of Disneyland’s original animators, Dr. Niblack. He spent well over 70,000 hours creating most of what we are seeing.
Some of his creations are animated.
Some of his creations are not animated - as in movement.
This furniture was totally hand carved by Dr. Niblack from Ponderosa Pines in 1948.
The remainder of the tour was filled with many beautiful carvings that have been done by many carvers and are all for sale - that is if you have a ton of money and space to show it all off!!! They were beautiful!!!
This is an example of the progression of the process of carving a figure.
Our last stop for this day is the Crazy Horse Memorial. After the “white man” made his Mt. Rushmore Memorial to honor the American Hero’s, Lakota Chief Standing Bear wanted to show the “white men” that the “red men” had great hero’s also. He invited Korczak Ziolkowski from Connecticut to come to the Black Hills and make his memorial - Crazy Horse. In 1948 the dedication blast took off just 10 tons of the mountain - several million tons have been removed to date.
The first photo was taken on May 28, 2003 - our first visit to Crazy Horse. The second photo was taken from the same spot on June 10, 2010 - our second visit to Crazy Horse. Can you see a difference? I think that most of the work has been to carve the other side of the mountain which will make this a 3-dimensional carving. Hopefully we will live long enough to see the finished carving - it will be awesome when it is complete!
This drawing on the picture shows what the memorial should look like when it is done - it will be very impressive.
Our journey from Crazy Horse back to our campground will take us along the Needles Highway, thru Custer State Park and along Iron Mountain Road. This is the very long way back, but the journey was very beautiful!
Tunnels are the big thing on the Needles Highway. The name comes from the needle like spires in this part of the Black Hills. One interesting formation is called the “eye of the needle” and it does look like the end of a normal sewing needle!
Passing thru Custer State Park, we encountered many of the parks Bison. They are huge and can be very dangerous - even the ones in the park that are sort of used to people and cars!
The Iron Mountain Road is a very scenic drive heading back toward the Mt. Rushmore Memorial. It has several of it’s own tricky tunnels, some of which frame the Mt. Rushmore Memorial. These tunnels are all one-lane and some have blind curves entering and/or leaving the tunnel. Fortunately there isn’t very much traffic this day, but I can imagine the chaos that can be during peak tourist season!
After a long day of touring, we headed back to Rapid City and a wonderful dinner at the local Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant. More adventures later…..
No comments:
Post a Comment