June 23rd, 2017
Devils Tower National Monument
Devils Tower, WY
About:
Devils Tower is the U.S. first national monument. It’s kind of in the middle of nowhere being in the far Northeast corner of Wyoming. It’s super weird looking too. It looks like no other rock formation around that area and it just pops up out of the plains and rolling hills as you approach it. I guess that’s why it was featured in Spielberg’s classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Funny side note, the gift shop is really riding that free publicity train by selling all sorts of alien dolls and the movie itself.
Geologists aren’t even really sure how it formed. They agree that magma pushed through the sedimentary layers of rock about 50 million years ago, but they cannot agree upon how that process took place and if the magma reached the land’s surface. We’re not geologists, but if you’re interested in learning more here is a link to the NPS website for more info.
We really liked native tribes origin stories on how the tower was formed. Here is a link to one of those stories on Indian Country Media Network.
And if you want to hear a funny story that happened at the tower follow this link to the story of George Hopkins, who parachuted onto the rock but lost his rope to get down.
Driving into the park from the South gives a great overview of the landscape. There are sprawling ranchlands dotted with cattle, rolling hills covered in white sage, and a juniper tree scattered here and there. This is a dry land, so by the time of our visit most of the grassland is brown, so it has that desert feel.
After taking the shot from this pull off, Camrin went and found herself a tarantula. Scroll forward now if you don’t like spiders.
The park itself is not very big. Worth a day trip, but not more than that. We came two days after the summer solstice, which we didn’t know until we got to the tower, is a very sacred time for the First Peoples tribes of the area. For the month of June rock climbers voluntarily don’t climb the tower out of respect and the tribes are allowed to tie prayer flags to the trees and have ceremonies in the park. Being ignorant city kids from the midwest we were very humbled to be in the park at such an important time for the native people.
You can really feel the history of this place.
We really only spent maybe 5 hours in the park. In that time we did the 1.5 mile hike that goes around the tower’s base, and a 3 mile hike through the prairie dog town.
We did get lucky and saw a mama doe with her fawn.
On our second trail, we walked past a cave.
On our way back to the trail Laura almost stepped on the biggest snake either of us has ever seen. Laura may or may not have let out a little yelp of terror. It was a bull snake, which can mimic rattle snakes, but we knew it wasn’t. This snake was easily four feet long.
Not a bad day for wild life viewing. Granted two of the three sightings was in the creepy crawly division.
In the late afternoon, we left the park and made our way to the Black Hills National Forest section in Northeast Wyoming. We had a little trouble finding a place to park, but when we did we were surrounded by trees, wild oregano, white sage, yarrow, and wild lupine. And we had the place to ourselves.
If you find yourself in Northeastern Wyoming make the stop to see the Tower.
Off to Montana next. Thanks for reading the Blog. Here are a few more pics from Devils Tower
