South Dakota’s Wind Cave, Crazy Horse, and the Beauty of Magnificent Incompleteness

Wind Cave is different. Wind Cave is a story.

The cave is named for the wind that blows through its entrance — air pressure changes above ground push air in and out, as if the earth has lungs. When we left, my kids and I could barely pull the door closed behind us; the cave wanted to keep breathing. The Lakota called it Washun Niye, “the breathing hole of the earth,” and held it sacred as the place from which the buffalo and their own people first emerged into the world. White settlers “discovered” the entrance in 1881. By 1903 it was a National Park.

It was this cave that consumed the young life of Alvin McDonald, a teenager who began exploring its passages in the late 1880s and kept a diary of everything he found. He mapped corridors. He named rooms. He went back again and again, and started bringing tourists with him, charging admission, occasionally leaving them overnight in the dark when he had somewhere else to be and retrieving them the next morning. He died of typhoid fever around 20, having explored more of Wind Cave than anyone before him. The rangers tell his story with real tenderness: here was a kid with a candle and a notebook and an overwhelming need to know what was around the next corner, and apparently no particular anxiety about other people’s comfort.

I recognized something in that.

Our guide mentioned that visitors always ask whether Wind Cave and Jewel Cave connect somewhere underground. Both are only partially explored — vast unmapped passages still ahead — so no one knows for certain. Probably not, she said; Jewel has no wind phenomenon, which suggests they’re separate systems. But who knows. I found myself thinking about that uncertainty for the rest of the trip. South Dakota turns out to be a place of magnificent incompleteness: caves that may or may not connect, a monument still being carved after seven decades, a history still being reckoned with. There is so much still ahead.

Above Wind Cave, the bison were grazing in the cold. American bison were hunted nearly to extinction by the late 1800s, from an estimated 30 million animals down to perhaps 1,000. Wind Cave Park became one of the reintroduction sites in 1913, and the recovery worked. The park now maintains a free-roaming herd of 400 to 600. They are enormous and indifferent and they do not move for your car. I sat and waited while a young bull stood broadside in the lane, regarding me with what I can only describe as philosophical calm. The buffalo emerged here, the Lakota say. They nearly vanished. They came back. The cave is still breathing.

Reader Jerry Turley had told me Crazy Horse impressed him more than Rushmore. He was onto something. Rushmore is extraordinary — the sheer audacity of carving four faces at that scale isn’t something photographs prepare you for. But Crazy Horse, still being carved seven decades after sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began in 1948, carries a different weight. Ziolkowski died in 1982 without seeing it finished. His family has continued. He built something he knew would outlast him, and somehow that makes it more moving than the four finished faces just up the road.

Reader Arthur Hillson had told me: Skip the tourist shops at Rushmore and buy a blanket directly from a Native artisan instead. Good advice I’m keeping in mind for the road ahead.

I drove back through Deadwood in the fading afternoon, a town that has leaned fully into its own mythology, saloons and history museums stacked on top of each other.

Catherine Laton told me to take water in the Badlands. I did. She was right about that too. Atlas Obscura has 64 places listed in South Dakota — many that I didn’t get to. Yet.

— Louise

PS – This is part of my quest to see all 50 states before the 250th birthday of our country on July 4th. I hope you will email me your thoughts about traveling across the United States at ceo@atlasobscura.com