Finishing Crazy Horse

Are the mountain carvers preparing to set a completion date?

By Paul Higbee

Seventy-seven years into sculpting at Crazy Horse Memorial, there was a burst of technical developments in 2025 perhaps unparalleled in previous carving seasons. The advances — driven by young, confident, whip-smart South Dakotans — might even bring the memorial’s completion date into sight.

On a cool Black Hills summer morning atop Thunderhead Mountain, more than a mile above sea level, a dozen workers assembled to continue cutting the massive figure of the 19th century Lakota legend from the mountain’s granite cap. They are experts in wielding power drills, rock saws, hand chisels, jet-fuel torches, and also at fabricating unique tools suited to this type of sculpture.

More likely than ever, answers Caleb Ziolkowski, the director of mountain carving. He believes the world’s largest sculpture could be finished in decades, not centuries as observers a generation ago sometimes projected. Caleb, 41, believes the work may be mostly done in his lifetime. Children alive today almost certainly will see its completion.

Caleb and his brother, Vaughn, who is three years younger and in charge of day-to-day mountain operations, are grandsons of original Crazy Horse sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. Their grandfather worked on the massive carving for more than three decades. He died in 1982, before Caleb and Vaughn were born.

Korczak was such a big personality that some observers saw the project as a one-man show. However, the charismatic artist always answered to a board of directors. The Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation has remained a constant force and today’s CEO, Whitney Rencountre II, 46, comes with a background unlike any of his predecessors. He grew up on the Crow Creek Reservation in central South Dakota, a son of Indian Country who hails from, as Crazy Horse famously said, “where my dead lie buried.”

Even before Rencountre took charge in 2022, the mountain was quieting. Absent is a sound that many recall from Korczak’s era: blasting to remove rock. Sometimes there were ceremonial night blasts, with the public invited, that marked special occasions. “But we haven’t used explosives for the past nine years,” Caleb says.

Today’s scientific methods differ greatly from Korczak’s approach. He often labored alone, utilizing hardened muscles, explosives, jackhammers and a bulldozer. The 2025 crew put that old-school hardware to use, too, but this spring Caleb also spent several weeks learning to operate the remote-controlled crane and a German-made robotic arm. The latter will be programmed for carving tasks in spots difficult for humans to reach and for repetitive work that could be painfully mundane for people. The only drawback may be that robotics and some other advanced technologies don’t function well when temperatures fall below 40 degrees. That limits full carving activity at Thunderhead Mountain to about 120 days per year.

Korczak was thought of as a self-taught artist. But Caleb has learned that his grandfather was always open to learning evolving technologies and to outside expertise. Technology development, then and now, “has always been market-driven,” Caleb says. “And when it comes to mountain carving, we’re a market of one.”

Still, there are other endeavors that parallel what mountain carvers do. In the mid-1970s, civil engineer Gary Renner surveyed Ziolkowski land in Custer County. He got to know Korczak and mentioned how engineers use coordinate geometry and surveyors when planning earth moving projects. Renner thought that system would work for calculating rock removal for the sculpture, too. Years later he demonstrated his idea successfully on the mountain and “basically gave the Crazy Horse carvers a new tool, and they ran with it,” Renner says.

Caleb and Vaughn’s grandfather designed the carving in the 1940s — Crazy Horse astride a steed and pointing to lands his people lost to Euro-American geographic expansion. But Korczak always knew he would struggle and compromise as the mountain revealed its geology. “That hasn’t changed,” Caleb says. “I’m honoring my grandfather’s vision and the laws of physics.”

Korczak set the project up for perpetual financial struggle by proclaiming that it would never accept government money. The foundation relies on visitor admissions and individual and corporate support. In 2025, the year the term DOGE entered the American vocabulary, that commitment never looked wiser. After all, struggles “are part of the part of the DNA of this place,” Caleb says.

Millions of Americans first caught a glimpse of the burly, bearded Korczak Ziolkowski, and heard his Boston-accented voice, in June of 1961 when he appeared on a national TV game show called “To Tell the Truth” and explained his dream to a celebrity panel. Television and newspaper reporters, eager for rugged Black Hills adventure, beat a path to his mountain north of Custer. They watched Korczak carve, heard stories about his rough upbringing in Boston, and learned of his role as an assistant to Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum in 1939.

Caleb has researched his grandfather’s life and that of the significant Lakota chief Standing Bear, who believed Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko) best represented unwavering resistance to encroaching settlement in the 19th century. “I don’t believe Standing Bear had much interest in the arts until he saw what Gutzon Borglum was doing at Mount Rushmore,” Caleb says. “By 1931 he was in contact with Borglum about a possible Crazy Horse mountain carving.”

Rushmore kept Borglum occupied for the rest of his life. When Standing Bear read how Borglum’s assistant, Ziolkowski, had won first prize in a sculpture competition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, he approached Ziolkowski and found him intrigued. Others were less enthused, including U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Caleb recounts that Ickes listened to Standing Bear’s vision and replied, “Those are lovely words, but I don’t like my mountains carved.”

Standing Bear persevered even as his sculptor of choice left for World War II combat in Europe. At some point a government official advised Standing Bear to consider Porcupine Butte, between the Black Hills and Pine Ridge. “Standing Bear said no, that Crazy Horse gave his life in defending the Black Hills,” Caleb says. “The Black Hills were where this memorial had to be. Standing Bear didn’t just suggest this project, he fought for it.”

He was joined in the fight by Ziolkowski, who returned to South Dakota in 1947. Together they secured Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills’ high granite country, in part by utilizing laws that make mining a priority. Mountain sculpting, after all, can be classified as mining. “I’m impressed that my grandfather believed in this enough to make it his life’s work when he was in a position to live comfortably pursuing commissioned sculpture,” Caleb says.

Those he touched were similarly committed, including his first wife, professional musician Dorothy Comstock Ziolkowski, whose support never wavered even after the couple divorced. His second wife, Ruth Ross Ziolkowski (Caleb and Vaughn’s grandmother), became a true South Dakota icon as she led the Crazy Horse project for 32 years after Korczak’s death. “I can’t carve a mountain,” Ruth said, but she promised to do anything else she could behind the scenes. That included leading project and financial planning with the board, raising 10 children (some of whom proved they could carve a mountain), welcoming a sitting U.S. president to the site, and answering phones. Ruth’s voice was heard by countless callers when they telephoned the memorial.

It’s hard to overstate what Ruth did in moving the project forward in the late 1980s when she broke from her husband’s carving plan to focus on, and complete, Crazy Horse’s face. There was pushback from some close to the project but, Caleb says, his grandmother demonstrated “bravery in staying with the idea of altering the plan.” Ruth and Korczak’s daughter, Monique, stepped up as head sculptor during that period. The face (87.5 feet long) became the carving’s first fully discernible feature and won the project immense public credibility. Today it gazes across the Black Hills, as recognizable to South Dakotans as Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln just down the road.

Crazy Horse’s face is bigger than the Rushmore likenesses, so it surprises people to learn that it will encompass only 1.7 percent of the finished sculpture. That’s a reminder of how huge the completed memorial will be: 641 feet long and 563 feet high. People who snap a picture of Thunderhead Mountain from the visitors’ center may feel they’re fairly close but, in fact, are 4,000 feet away. The finished sculpture will comprise 300,000 square feet of finished surface, compared to Mount Rushmore’s 10,000 square feet.

Caleb earned a master’s degree in statistics at UCLA and a Ph.D. in law and diplomacy from the same university. He had previously studied at Tufts University. “You can’t get a degree in mountain carving, but I sort of selected classes and made my own major,” he says.

“Caleb is beyond brilliant and always kind,” says Kay Jorgensen, the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation’s past chair who played a role in hiring him. Like Rencountre, the Ziolkowski brothers are successful products of a small South Dakota town — in their case Custer. Their father Joel (Ruth and Korczak’s son) is a longtime pastor there. Caleb and Vaughn credit their aunt Monique for bringing them into substantive creative work at Crazy Horse.

Their workforce on the mountain hails from across the country, some with small town South Dakota roots similar to what Caleb, Vaughn and Whitney knew. By contrast, Tom Castelan had never heard of Crazy Horse Memorial until he visited the Black Hills from Arkansas several years ago. Impressed by what he saw, Castelan applied for a job and got it. Today he manages a big shop built into the mountainside and fabricates heavy-duty carving equipment not commercially available and maybe not even invented yet. Accepting a job here means committing to a process of perpetual learning. A few hundred feet from the machine shop on that summer morning, carvers were gearing up to tackle granite with noisy drills. Suddenly a sharp metallic clanking pierced the air as Tyler Brezke, a Webster native, used a manual chisel and hammer to add details near the great figure’s left hand.

Several blocks of granite, car-sized and bigger, sat on ledges near the summit and reflected an important way in which procedures here differ from Mount Rushmore’s. There, when granite was blasted or chiseled away, it fell and broke and comprised a rocky slope that remains in place today. In fact the “talus slope,” as the National Park Service calls it, is now considered part of Mount Rushmore and will never be removed. Caleb calls a similar rocky slope below Crazy Horse “the muck pile.” He plans to remove it all, enhancing the sculpture’s height and also yielding the granite blocks for construction projects. Each is labeled, documenting where on the sculpture it originated.

“As building material it will be meaningful because of where it comes from,” Caleb says. The granite could end up in structures anywhere across the region and will certainly be part of the buildings in a developing complex below the mountain, which already includes the Indian Museum of North America, the Native American Educational and Cultural Center, and the Indian University of North America. Eventually, Rencountre and the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation board hope to see a medical training center developed there. Visitors often say the museum, originally designed by Korczak and Ruth’s late daughter, Anne, is the off-mountain component currently most developed and meaningful for them. In the 1970s and ’80s, Anne took on a huge responsibility in seeking exhibit items not only from Great Plains peoples, but from tribes across the American continent. Sometimes when Rencountre sees visitors fully engaged in studying one of the museum exhibits, or enjoying cultural presentations, it reminds him of when he left Crow Creek to attend Black Hills State University and the joy he felt in a learning community where students and faculty genuinely cared about his people’s stories. As Caleb studies technologies that will improve cutting granite, Rencountre is looking into technologies that will enhance museum storytelling. Though their tasks and backgrounds differ, the young men have become great friends.

A day may come, Caleb says, when the public “sees the mountain as the smallest part of it all.” He adds that then no one will ask when the project will be completed because the educational aspects and human services missions of the memorial — as with other proven institutions — will hopefully never end.

In 2025, there have been moments that brought satisfaction in their own right, sometimes separate and more immediate from the memorial’s lofty goals. “I remember thinking,” Caleb says, “for the longest time, how cool it would be to set up one of the world’s largest free-standing cranes on top of a mountain.”

This year Caleb, Whitney and their workers did exactly that — and it might be the catalyst that helps bring the family’s original vision to fruition faster than anyone could have dreamed.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.