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Published: March 27th 2012
Devils Tower
Every visitor to Devils Tower has this perfect photograph, taken a short distance along the base trail.I headed west today, into Wyoming.
When crossing the border, one sees the highway stretching away in the distance by a long mountain ridge.
I thought at first these were the Rocky Mountains.
In reality, they are the last gasp of the Black Hills.
My main target, Devil’s Tower, lies within them.
There are three roads to get there.
I ultimately chose the long northern route, because it is the most scenic.
The first part goes through rolling ranch land, with the mountains in the distance.
Slabs of sandstone start appearing in the hills.
The road ultimately enters a valley, on par with what the rest of the Black Hills has to offer.
Along the way, it passes a town sign that I had to stop and reread, just to make sure it was not a misprint: “Entering
Alva. Population 50”.
The towns in the sandhills (see
The Long and Lonely Road) were small, but few were this small.
The road later passed through something I would need to get used to, a one street town which looked like a western movie set.
Residents clearly wanted business from
Devils Tower columns
Closeup of the basalt columns of Devils Tower, taken with camera zoom. people visiting the nearly sights.
Devils Tower
Eventually, the road cleared a rise, and
Devils Tower appeared for the first time.
The silhouette is unmistakable, a mountain shaped like a giant tree stump.
The silhouette grew as I got closer.
Just before the entrance, I passed through what passes for sprawl in these parts, a complex of private campgrounds and gift shops in the middle of the range land.
The park service runs a museum on the tower.
It is the core of an
ancient volcano.
It is made of columns of
volcanic basalt.
This rock shrinks as it cools and breaks into
hexagonal shaped columns.
Devils Tower is made up of thousands of them, the largest and longest columns of this type in the world.
The tower is slowly eroding as ice and wind break the columns and splinter them off the tower.
One may prefer the
Lakota version of how the tower formed.
An enormous evil bear chased a group of children.
The children prayed to the Great Spirit to save them.
The Great Spirit caused the ground under them to rise.
Belle Fource River valley
The Belle Fourche River Valley, near Devils Tower, seen from the overlook along the base trail. Scenes for Close Encounters of the Third Kind were filmed in the field in the middle distance. The bear clawed at the rising ground, forming the columns as it did so.
The museum has a painting of this legend that is almost worth the price of admission by itself.
Older movie fans may remember that Devils Tower had a prominent role in the movie “
Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
The museum mentions that fame in passing.
The original plan was to film many scenes for the movie in a field below the tower (which the entrance road now passes through).
In the end, only eight minutes of that footage made it in, and the rest was stock footage and studio recreations.
Ouch!
From the museum, a trail goes around the base of the tower.
The trail is almost the definition of a tourist trail, paved with benches to rest.
The trail gives ever changing views of the tower and the rock debris at its base.
It starts by passing through a large boulder field.
The field gives a perfect view of the columns of the tower.
Native American prayer flags are tied to trees in this section.
From there,
Welcome to driving hell
This is what north central Wyoming looks like. Be sure to check gas, and stay awake any way possible. it passes through pine forest.
One part gives an amazing overlook of the valleys around the tower.
One thing that the trail makes obvious is that the tower is not symmetrical like most people believe; it only looks that way from certain angles.
The tower is actually shaped like a trapezoid, with the shorter side having shed more rocks.
The last part of the trail went through a grove of birch trees, rare in this area.
Northern Wyoming
After the tower, I had a long drive.
This was a drive to test the nerve, and soul.
The first part went through more mountain valleys, which I liked.
It then entered flat prairie.
This is the rangeland of north central Wyoming, which may be the dullest landscape in the United States.
It combines the flatness of eastern Nebraska with the emptiness of the Sandhills.
At least the Sandhills went up and down.
I drove for hours and could barely tell I had moved.
This road was the first place I saw an interstate exit onto a dirt road, and the first sign warning to check gas
Heaven
The Bighorn Mountains near sunset, from a rest area along I-90. since the next station was eighty plus miles away.
I also passed a coal strip mine right next to the highway.
Things got better near sunset.
The
Bighorn Mountains, the easternmost part of the Rockies in Wyoming, rose like a phoenix on the horizion.
I saw a long line of mountains and canyons, many covered in snow.
My soul jumped for joy; the long tedious drives across the plains (see
Land of Lincoln and
Journeys into Boredom) are finally at an end!
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