Under dark skies at six o’clock on a recent morning, headlights began streaming into the Crazy Horse Memorial complex near Custer, S.D. Once the sun was above the Black Hills, the first wave of hikers, more than 1,000 people, strode past a welcome banner.
As they wended toward the summit of Thunderhead Mountain, they paused now and then to gaze up at the enormous face carved into the granite more than six thousand feet above sea level.
Emerging from that same rock was a gigantic left hand, with a 29-foot, six-inch index finger pointing across the mountains and toward the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation, a longtime home of the Oglala Lakota tribe.
The face and hand are part of a colossal carving now in its 77th year of construction. If and when the work is completed, it will depict the Oglala Lakota chief Crazy Horse astride a fast-galloping stallion. At 563 feet high and 642 feet long, it will be the world’s largest sculpture, nearly ten times as tall and three times as long as the Great Sphinx of Giza.
“You can really see they’re ramping up progress,” said Jeff Tuschen, 63, a retired farmer from Salem, S.D., who was making his 12th visit.
The summit is closed to the public all but two days of the year, when the operators of the Crazy Horse Memorial allow visitors to walk a 3-mile or 6-mile loop and view the sculpture-in-progress up close. The recent hike, on Sept. 28, drew 5,170 people, according to the organizers.
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