[ FOTO ] Crazy Horse Monument — Ruth Ziolkowski

Crazy Horse sculptor's 85-year-old widow says it is her life's work to ensure world's largest monument is completed

Nearly every morning for more than half a century, 85-year-old Ruth Ziolkowski rises around dawn, puts her feet on the ground and gives thanks she is part of a dream. Since 1947, she has worked at the Crazy Horse monument to Native Americans in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where she is leading the effort to literally move a mountain.

'I'm tickled to death to get up every morning and go to work,' Mrs Ziolkowski, president of the non-profit Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, said in an interview. Stony stare: Widow Ruth Ziolkowski, 85, is continuing her scluptor husband's work, which began in 1947 and has yielded this 90-foot-tall carved granite face of Crazy Horse.

Stony stare: Widow Ruth Ziolkowski, 85, is continuing her scluptor husband's work, which began in 1947 and has yielded this 90-foot-tall carved granite face of Crazy Horse, Billed as the world's largest sculpture, Crazy Horse is only a 20-mile drive from better-known Mount Rushmore, where faces of presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt are carved into granite. The sculpture's final dimensions are planned to be 641 feet wide and 563 feet high. That would surpass the current biggest monument, the Spring Temple Buddha in Lushan County, Henan, China, which measures 420 feet in height. Already, the face of Crazy Horse, which measures 87 feet in height, dwarfs the 60-feet tall faces of the presidents of Mount Rushmore.

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