Devils Tower

Devils Tower rises out of the rolling pine and prairie country of north-eastern Wyoming like a giant fluted stump: a flat-topped column of grey rock about 265 metres high from its base, with its summit at 1,558 metres above sea level and nearly 390 metres above the Belle Fourche River that loops beneath it. Its sides are made of hundreds of long polygonal columns, most of them six-sided but some four, five or seven, up to six metres across, fitted together like a bundle of pencils. At the foot lies a skirt of broken columns that have fallen over the millennia.

The rock is phonolite porphyry, a grey igneous rock studded with white feldspar crystals, which was pushed up as molten magma into the overlying sedimentary rocks about forty million years ago and cooled underground; as it cooled it contracted and cracked into columns. It is most often interpreted as an eroded laccolith. What is clear is that the softer rocks around it have since been stripped away by erosion, leaving the hard core standing alone.

For the Lakota and other Plains peoples the tower is sacred, and it has many names, among them Mato Tipila, Bear Lodge. One story tells of girls who were chased by giant bears and prayed for help; the ground beneath them rose into the sky, and the bears' claws scored the long grooves in its sides, while the girls became the stars of the Pleiades. In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt made it the first national monument of the United States. In deference to Native ceremonies held here, climbers are asked to refrain from climbing voluntarily in June, and most comply.

The tower has its own climbing history. On 4 July 1893 two local men, William Rogers and Willard Ripley, reached the top by a ladder of wooden pegs driven into a crack; a stretch of it can still be seen from the trail. In 1941 a parachutist, George Hopkins, landed on the summit as a stunt and was stranded for six days before climbers brought him down. Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) made the tower famous around the world. The Tower Trail, a loop of about two kilometres around the base, is the best way to feel its scale, looking up through the pines at columns that seem to lean outward as they rise.

Getting there

Devils Tower is in north-eastern Wyoming, near the small towns of Hulett and Sundance; the nearest city of size is Gillette, about 71 km away. The nearest airport is Northeast Wyoming Regional Airport in Gillette (GCC), about 71 km away. The monument is reached by road; from the visitor centre, the paved Tower Trail of about 1.3 miles circles the base.