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National park tips: On your Mount Rushmore trip, see Crazy Horse too

An easy drive from Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the Crazy Horse Memorial is still a work in progress.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
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Either before or after your road trip to Mount Rushmore National Memorial, head 16 miles west to South Dakota’s Crazy Horse Memorial.

It’s bigger than Rushmore, and still in progress, though Crazy Horse’s face was completed in 1998.

The auteur here, who started in 1948, was a Boston-born former Rushmore laborer named Korczak Ziolkowski. But give plenty of credit to Ruth Ziolkowski, the widow who kept this enterprise going after from 1982 until her death in 2014.

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This is not an NPS site, but a network of Ziolkowski family businesses (there were 10 children, many grandchildren). Admission: $11 per person in cars, $5 per person on motorcycle.

In honor of this year’s National Park Service centennial, the Travel section is posting 100 park travel ideas and tips based on trips staff travel writer Christopher Reynolds has taken, along with photo-op advice from Times photographer Mark Boster. We’ll post one per day through Dec. 31.

Follow Reynolds on Twitter: @MrCSReynolds

See travel videos by Reynolds from around the world.

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