My lands are where my dead lay buried (Post for Sept. 9)

Right now, I’m watching some dark clouds roll across the big Wyoming sky while Justin triumphantly calls out the word, “Virginia!”
We’re collecting license plates of all the states.
Then he said, “For all we know, they just went ‘Missouri, whooo!’”
Today was probably the coolest day of our trip so far. We woke up early, having finally slept for a reasonable amount of hours. We had to be at Crazy Horse for our interview at 9:30 and after that, we were going to Devil’s Tower and wanted to get into our campsite near the Little Bighorn battlefield at the Crow reservation (they are Native Americans) before dark.


Our contact at Crazy Horse was Ace Crawford, and we met her there then went to watch a short video about the memorial before going to the top. If anyone of you reading has heard of or been to Crazy Horse, you’ll understand while we all quietly asked each other, “did she really say we were going to the top?” as we watched the video.


Yeah, we got to stand on Crazy Horse’s arm and look at his face. It’s 87.5 feet tall. He could eat Mount Rushmore.
At this point, we were sold. Ace drove us up there and we had a great time talking to her. She used to work for Tom Daschle, former Democratic senator from South Dakota. We were really happy to meet a fellow Democrat out here in one of them red states and she cheered to hear we had an Obama magnet on our car. She was really awesome and we started wondering we ought to have interviewed her instead.
But the point of the trip was the monument and so our interview would be with Mrs. Ruth Ziolkowski, wife of the original sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski and her daughter, Monique. Mrs. Z, as they call her, was in a meeting when we got back from the mountain, so we had a wonderful lunch of Native American tacos with Ace, courtesy of the memorial, before going back to a studio away from the public eye for the interview.
It went wonderfully and Luke commented afterwards that he wasn’t sure we could top that.
We were all pretty blown away by the story and the mission of Crazy Horse. I could fill up 8 blog posts with information about it, so I’ll send you to the website, www.crazyhorsememorial.com if you’d like to learn more. Once we’re back, we’ll be happy to tell you anything you’d like to know and would love to show the footage of the interview.
Once you hear enough about the project, you can’t help but want to help. We were supposed to ask for Ace before we paid to get into the site so she could let us in for free, but we forgot (this was my fault) and later were glad we had given them something. Caroline keeps saying if she had the money, she’d want to contribute immediately. That’s the problem with being in college; you don’t have the cash to do that sort of thing. I’m planning to tell everyone I know, particularly my parents, to try to help them. It’s really an awesome cause.


Anyway, after getting out rather late from Crazy Horse, we hightailed it out to Devil’s Tower. I love Devil’s Tower. It’s very cool. My father will be pleased to know that the others were in awe of it as well. Sadly, we couldn’t stay longer than 20 minutes or so because we wanted to try to get to our campground before too late. It’s 8:00 now, so we’re just past sunset, but maybe we can get out tent set up before the predicted rain starts to fall.
Tomorrow is a chill day. We’re going to the Little Bighorn battlefield tomorrow morning and then driving to Yellowstone. We found out today that Brian Schweitzer had to cancel our interview Friday, so the last interview before Seattle is Suzanne Lewis, superintendent of Yellowstone. I’m excited for geysers!

-bekerz



p.s. Puppy at the campsite!