Today started off as a repeat of yesterday, running the Badlands loop again, breakfast at the same beautiful location and photos of more prairie dogs and bison.
It is very hot (anywhere between 90 F and 100 F) and the air quality has changed for the worse as the wind has gone down. Heat haze and wildfire smoke has decreased the quality of landscape photography. I am glad we got out early yesterday morning. Today is so different.
We arrived in the Black Hills area with few opportunities for picnicking and it’s too hot anyway to be outside. We put the A/C on in the van and made and ate sandwiches inside. The beauty of our lithium ion battery system allows us to do this without being plugged in.
We decided to do the Crazy Horse Memorial this afternoon rather than tomorrow mainly to be somewhere inside out of the blistering heat… fully masked of course.
Crazy Horse memorial
Crazyhorsememorial.org
The Crazy Horse Memorial is a mountain monument under construction on privately held land in the Black Hills, in Custer County, South Dakota, United States. It will depict the Oglala Lakota warrior, Crazy Horse, riding a horse and pointing to his tribal land. Wikipedia
Artist: Korczak Ziolkowski
Construction started: 1948
Height: 564′
Dimensions: 564′ 0″ x 640′ 0″
Beginning date: June 3, 1948
Architect: Korczak Ziolkowski
Designer: Korczak Ziolkowski
The memorial master plan includes the mountain carving monument, an Indian Museum of North America, and a Native American Cultural Center. The monument is being carved out of Thunderhead Mountain, on land considered sacred by some Oglala Lakota, between Custer and Hill City, roughly 17 miles (27 km) from Mount Rushmore. The sculpture’s final dimensions are planned to be 641 feet (195 m) long and 563 feet (172 m) high. The arm of Crazy Horse will be 263 feet (80 m) long and the head 87 feet (27 m) high; by comparison, the heads of the four U.S. Presidents at Mount Rushmore are each 60 feet (18 m) high.
Crazy Horse was a Native American war leader of the Oglala Lakota. He took up arms against the U.S. Federal government to fight against encroachments on the territories and way of life of the Lakota people. His most famous actions against the U.S. military included the Fetterman Fight (21 December 1866) and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (25–26 June 1876). He surrendered to U.S. troops under General Crook in May 1877 and was fatally wounded by a military guard, allegedly while resisting imprisonment at Camp Robinson in present-day Nebraska. He ranks among the most notable and iconic of Native American tribal members and was honored by the U.S. Postal Service in 1982 with a 13¢ postage stamp that is part of its Great Americans series. (Wikipedia).
We will be in this area 3 nights although only 1 night in this campground. We are too close to our neighbors for our nightly pre-dinner music. We have been able to meet some of our camping ‘neighbors’. Last night we met a charming couple from the Dallas area who came by for a “tour” of our van. We are discovering people who have much larger rigs (a new term for what we are driving) but are getting tired of towing and hauling and ready to downsize. We have seen a lot more class ‘B’ units like ours than we see in the east. A woman from Colorado driving a similar unit came by the other night to compare notes.
Fortunately it cools down with sundown and is nice for sleeping. Netflix download tonight outside on Brian’s laptop with our little ‘bonfire’.
Louise and Brian McLeod Travel Blog 
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