Badlands National Park, South Dakota to Devil's Tower National Monument, Wyoming
When I awoke during the night to answer nature’s call, I heard the soft pitter-pat of rainfall on the roof of the motorhome. But we were warm and snug, and I drifted right back to sleep, feeling relieved that our years of tent camping were long past. Nothing is worse than waking on a cold, rainy morning and knowing that you have to rise up from that ultra-comfortable, 1” thick foam pad on the hard ground, unzip the tent, step outside to pee behind a bush, then fix breakfast over a sputtering Coleman stove with cold rain dripping down your neck. So what if it was still raining lightly when we awoke again at 6:30? We only had to flip a switch and in just a few short minutes we had a nice, hot cup of coffee to savor while we snuggled under our lush down comforter. But alas, we must be on the road again, so I had to don my raincoat and go out into the elements to unhook our electrical umbilical cord which made all these luxuries possible; then it was off to Wyoming and the Devil’s Tower.
For
those that remember the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the Devil’s
Tower is the place where the UFO came to take Richard Dreyfus and a whole bunch
of other geeks that had been mysteriously “selected” or somehow drawn by mashed
potato sculptures to volunteer to be transported off to outer space so they
could be enlightened (or maybe studied, probed, and placed in a zoo in some
far-off galaxy). Or maybe they were just
trading places with the dazed-looking pilots from the missing Bermuda Triangle
flight whom they passed coming down the gangway as they entered the spaceship.
Anyway,
the Devil’s Tower is a real place — it does in fact exist in the far northeast
corner of Wyoming, a few miles west of Sturgis, South Dakota, the site of that
other unworldly annual event, the Harley-Davidson motorcycle rally. The tower sits in the midst of a lovely
landscape of gentle, pine-covered hills, interspersed with lush meadows filled
with black cattle grazing on the brilliant green new grass of spring. The Devil’s Tower, or as it was known to the
Native American tribes in the area before they were so rudely interrupted by
Manifest Destiny, the Bear’s Den, the Bear’s Lodge, the Bear’s Teepee, or some
variation thereof. It was, and still is,
a sacred site, to these people, and there remain a number of restrictions
regarding use and access by non-Indians.
Physically, it’s a giant column of magma that forced its way up through
the crust of the earth, then was exposed as the ground around it eroded away
over millions of years. Rising from a
base of weathered boulders that have fallen from the tower over time, it rises
vertically for several hundred feet to a nearly smooth top about the size of a
football field. What makes it
interesting is that today it has taken the form of continuous stone columns,
mostly hexagonal, that rise is one striated mass above the base of
boulders. It is believed that as the
magma cooled, it fractured in uniform vertical columns. This gives it the grooved appearance that the
Indian legends say was caused by a giant bear trying to climb the stone to get
a group of young girls. The bear failed,
and the girls became the group of stars that we today call the Pleiades,
The
Devil’s Tower is a National Monument, which means it’s a step down from being a
National Park and doesn’t get the financial benefits of a slick, modern visitor
center. It has to make do with a humble
log building built by the CCC back before I was born. Not that that’s bad, mind you, it’s just that
even on a rainy day in May before the tourists hit in serious numbers, it was a
bit cramped. And it doesn’t have a
theater with a Hollywood-produced movie to explain what it’s all about. But it does have a nice campground (dry
camping only — no electric hookups) located in a grove of ancient cottonwood
trees on the flats above the Belle Fourche River. And there is a series of wonderful trails
around the base of the tower. All in
all, it’s a place to put on your bucket list if you haven’t already been there.
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| The Devil's Tower from our campsite. |
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