Hokah Hey!

The white statue in the foreground is the model for the finished sculputre, currently being carved from the living rock in the background there. It's even bigger than it looks.

The Crazy Horse Monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota

For scale, that's me in the blue shirt to the right next to the giant head of the Crazy Horse Memorial. The Ziolkowski family has been painstakingly chipping away at another Black Hills mountain since 1948 to craft a statue of the Sioux warrior riding his horse, touted as the world's largest mountain carving.

The Crazy Horse Memorial was conceived as a sort of Native American answer to Mt. Rushmore—though not all local Native Americans are thrilled by this decades-long project desecrating yet another one of their sacred Black Hills.

It is somehow simultaneously impressive (in that "How did they do that?" kind of way) and slightly sickening (in that "Why did they do that?" kind of way). It is also a monument to one odd family's stubborn desire to see the project through over several generations.

Also, among the small "museum" section of Native Americana in the welcome center-cum-gift shop is what they claim are the actual beads the Dutch infamously used to "buy" Manhattan from a local tribe for the equivalent of about $18. They are blue.

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