On June 3rd, 1948, a blast rocked the Black Hills of South Dakota. Ten tons of stone were dislodged from the mountainside and tumbled to the earth below. Earlier that day, a man named Korczak had ascended the mountain and single-jacked four holes at 6,740 feet above sea level.

Single-jacking is the practice of placing a drill-bit against hard rock, slamming it with a four-pound sledge hammer, then rotating the drill and banging it again until the hole is finished. It is a labor-intensive effort and a single man might only drill six to eight feet over the course of a day.

Over the following years more than eight million tons of rock would be blasted away. What was once a silent silhouette in stone began to take on a new shape. It would not be until over a decade after Korczak's death