| On June 3rd, 1948, a blast rocked the Black Hills of | | | | four-pound sledge hammer, then rotating the drill and |
| South Dakota. Ten tons of stone were dislodged from | | | | banging it again until the hole is finished. It is a |
| the mountainside and tumbled to the earth below. | | | | labor-intensive effort and a single man might only drill |
| Earlier that day, a man named Korczak had ascended | | | | six to eight feet over the course of a day.Over the |
| the mountain and single-jacked four holes at 6,740 feet | | | | following years more than eight million tons of rock |
| above sea level.Single-jacking is the practice of placing | | | | would be blasted away. What was once a silent |
| a drill-bit against hard rock, slamming it with a | | | | silhouette in stone began to take on a new shape. |