(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Photo Diary: Devils Tower, WY [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-10 I’m just making a quick stop in Wyoming, mostly to break up the drive from Bismarck to Denver, and to visit Devils Tower. I’ve actually been here before, waayyyy back in 1972 when I was just a kid and we lived in Rapid City for a time. For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. According to the legends of the Lakota and Kiowa, there were once eight siblings who lived in the area around the Belle Fourche River in Wyoming. One day as they were playing, however, the brother was transformed into an enormous Grizzly Bear and attacked the seven sisters. As the sisters ran in terror, they came to a giant rock and climbed to the top. The giant Grizzly Bear continued to attack, raking the rock with its claws and scouring it with long deep scratches. To protect the little girls, the rock began to grow upwards towards the heavens, and eventually the girls reached the sky, becoming a group of seven stars in the sky. Today, we know the stars as the Pleiades, and the immense scoured rock is still visible today as Bear Lodge Butte. We call it Devils Tower. It remains a sacred site for the Native American Nations which inhabit this area. There is still some scientific dispute about exactly how Devils Tower was formed. It is known that around 50-60 million years ago, during the Paleocene and Eocene, this area was geologically active, with the Rocky Mountains and the Black Hills being formed. At some point, molten magma from the Earth’s mantle pushed up close to the surface here, leaving a dome of cooled magma which produced three prominent hills that we know now as the Little Missouri Buttes. Sometime later, perhaps 40 million years ago, another magma plume intruded into the rock layers. There is still some controversy over whether this dome stayed underground to become an intrusion or if it reached the surface to become a volcano (the current majority opinion seems to be that the flat top of the mass indicates that it remained subsurface, and that it encountered a layer of resistant rock above that forced the magma to spread out into a flat shape). In either case, the magma dome cooled over time, and formed a volcanic rock known as phonolite. As it contracted, the minerals crystalized to form a solid mass of hexagonal columns, in somewhat the same way that drying mud forms a series of little hexagons. Over the next few million years the sedimentary layers atop it were gradually eroded away by the Belle Fourche River valley, leaving the harder igneous rocks exposed. Perhaps one or two million years ago, the frozen magma core was exposed at the surface. Today, the magma mass projects dramatically above the surrounding landscape. The exposed portion rises 867 feet and is around 1000 feet wide at its base. The first written description of the formation comes from Captain William Raynolds, who stopped here during an 1859 journey to Yellowstone. When Colonel Richard Dodge, a member of the 1875 US Army expedition to the Black Hills, came upon the site, he asked his Lakota guides what they called it, and was told that it was “Black Bear Lodge”. Alas, that name was very similar in Lakota to “Bad Spirit Tower”, and so Dodge, in his book about the expedition, mistakenly dubbed it “Devil’s Tower”, and that is the name that has stuck (though the NPS has officially dropped the apostrophe). Recently there have been efforts by Wyoming’s Native Americans to officially rename it “Bear Lodge”, but this has been resisted by the tourism industry, who fear that it will confuse the tourists and keep them away. By 1890 the Tower was already a well-known tourist site, though there was no infrastructure here and it was hard to get to. On the Fourth of July 1893, as a publicity stunt, owners William Rogers and Willard Ripley climbed to the top of the Tower using a ladder made from large wooden pegs that had been hammered into the cracks between two rock columns. The Tower has been a mecca for rock climbers ever since, and teams of climbers can be regularly seen making ascents (with a permit from the National Park Service), some 4,000 a year. Since the site is still used by Native Americans for sun dances, prayer offerings, and vision quests, the National Park Service asks climbers to voluntarily suspend their activities here during the month of June. In September 1906, shortly after the Antiquities Act gave him the authority to protect historically significant places, President Theodore Roosevelt declared Devils Tower to be the country’s first National Monument, placing it under government protection. Geological surveys of the Tower came in 1907, which concluded that the Tower was an igneous intrusion, perhaps a volcanic plug. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed a number of buildings at the site, which now serve as the Visitors Center and administrative buildings. The CCC also built a paved path that runs completely around the Tower, and a number of nature trails. Today, the park covers about two square miles and receives about half a million visitors per year. In 1977, its otherworldly appearance was featured in the scifi movie classic “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. The Tower is very slowly disappearing. The base of the Tower is surrounded by a rubble field made as segments of the columns crack and break off. Today three or four boulders detach each year. Several million years into the future, only a huge pile of boulders will remain. Alas, the logistics of this park are in serious trouble. The parking lot by the Visitors Center is on top of the hill at the base of the Tower, and it is way too small for the number of visitors and fills up very quickly (the Visitors Center opens at 9, I got there just before 10, and it was already full up). Throughout the day the road up to the parking lot is periodically closed as the lot fills up. The overflow parking is at the bottom of the hill—and getting to the Visitors Center and the Tower Trail then means a 1.3 mile hike on a switchback dirt trail up the side of that hill with almost no shade. Maybe when I was younger, but my old and wrinkly body looked at that and said “Nope”. Instead I stayed at the bottom of the hill by the Prairie Dog town and the nature trail. Some photos from a visit: The tower in the distance. Off to the left are the Little Missouri Buttes. The Tower projects way above the surrounding landscape View from the overflow parking lot. The red sandstone layers below the Tower are Triassic in age. The dirt path up the hill to the Visitors Center A closeup on the hexagonal columns. The jumbled lower layer was likely formed within the subsurface groundwater, and the straight upper layer was above the water. A closeup of some climbers. They were about a third of the way up. This sculpture is called “The Circle of Sacred Smoke” A shot of the Tower Nature trail runs through the Prairie Dog Town Prairie Dogs A closeup [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/10/2181894/-Photo-Diary-Devils-Tower-WY Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/