Standing watch over Main Street in Hill City, South Dakota, is a bear you simply cannot miss — 30 feet tall, 25 feet wide, and carved entirely from wood by chainsaw. Created in 2021 by brothers Jordan and Jarrett Dahl of Dahl’s Chainsaw Art, along with five fellow artists who traveled from across the country, this colossal Smokey Bear came together in just 10 days flat. The town earned the honor for good reason: back in 1939, 25 students from Hill City’s school district pitched in to help battle a raging wildfire, and the grateful U.S. Forest Service made Hill City the only school district in the nation permitted to use Smokey Bear as its official mascot — a badge of pride the community still wears, and now carves, larger than life.

But the story behind that friendly, shovel-toting bear runs even deeper than one Black Hills carving. Smokey Bear was actually born twice. The first time was in 1944, when the Forest Service and the Ad Council invented a cartoon bear to remind a wartime nation to be careful with campfires. Six years later, in the spring of 1950, Smokey became real. A raging wildfire tore through New Mexico’s Capitan Mountains, and firefighters found a badly burned bear cub clinging to a scorched pine tree, having survived by climbing above the flames. Nursed back to health and flown to Washington, D.C., the cub took up residence at the National Zoo, where he lived for 26 years, received so much fan mail he was issued his own ZIP code, and became the living face of the longest-running public service campaign in American history. Today, whether you’re standing beneath the giant timber bear in Hill City or spotting his familiar ranger hat on a roadside sign somewhere out west, you’re looking at a legend that started as both an idea and a rescue — and never stopped growing.

Address: 100 Main St, Hill City, SD 57745
Website: https://www.dahlschainsawart.com/
Video: https://youtu.be/Hw2UgjgZPHE