By Irina Zhorov
Yellowstone
is pretty weird, right? Things gushing and bubbling up out of the ground,
Technicolor pools dotting the horizon like some sort of spectral remnants of a
sci-fi amusement park. The hot
springs of Thermopolis? Also pretty strange; water trickling from somewhere
within the earth, consistently nice and steamy. Wyoming’s also got dinosaur
fossils, fish fossils, giant mountains and glacial moraines. No shortage of
geologic wonders here. But Devils
Tower National Monument pretty much takes the cake.
And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Devils Tower was
the first site to be named a U.S. National Monument in 1906. And long before
that, the site was frequented by many different American Indian tribes and
considered sacred.
Devils Tower is a monolith that rises more than 1,000
feet out of the flat, rolling prairie that surrounds it. From a distance it
looks like the stump of a tree magnified one million times, but it’s actually
surrounded by normal sized trees, which makes approaching it pretty surreal
(surreal enough, in fact, to appear in Spielberg’s science fiction epic, “Close
Encounters of the Third Kind”).
Find Devils Tower National Park on the Black to Yellow route on our interactive map.
Find Devils Tower National Park on the Black to Yellow route on our interactive map.
When you approach the tower and examine it up close,
you’ll see that it actually looks like it’s made of a bundle of columns, like a
packet of pencils tied together. What it actually is though is an igneous
intrusion that, millions of years ago, made its way through the layers of
sedimentary rock. There’s still disagreement over how exactly that happened;
some say it’s a laccolith intrusion, others claim that it’s a volcanic plug of
an extinct volcano.
The monument is very accessible to visitors and is one of
Wyoming’s biggest attractions. Park at the Visitor Center and
take a stroll on the paved path that loops around the tower. Alternatively, you
can take longer hikes around the tower, some of which take you through the
prairie and on the sedimentary, red rock that surrounds the tower, which offers
another bizarre perspective of the tower’s irreconcilable presence in that
otherwise soft, flat landscape.
Because of the tower’s geometric columns, the tower has
also become a
popular place for climbers, who come there for the cracks. If you’re
planning to climb, keep in mind that there’s a voluntary climbing ban during
the month of June to give certain tribes the space to use the site for
ceremonies. If you’re not much of a climber yourself, it’s also fun to look for
the tiny human dots moving steadily up the pillar.
The monument is open year round, but if you’re planning
to come in the winter (which is my favorite time to go, quiet and especially
mesmerizing if there’s snow on the ground) check with the visitor center to
make sure roads are passable. Also consider the campground at Belle Fourche Campground inside the national monument park (open roughly from
April–October).


