Devils Tower, Wyoming, United States
Known to most Americans and people worldwide who have not
had the opportunity to visit it for its appearance in the 1977 movie “Close
Encounters of the Third Kind”, Devil’s Tower was America’s first national
monument, designated as such by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Can that
movie actually be almost 50 years old? It all makes me realize I’m an old man.
I first saw the tower on my first trip west in 1988. It made a major impression
on me as one of the first places I saw in a truly western landscape.
I’ve been back several times since, and it always continues
to impress. Devil’s Tower is considered a butte and has its origins
geologically as the lava interior of a volcano whose softer outer parts have
since eroded away. Devil’s Tower is 867 feet from base to top, but it looks
like more since its base is about 400 feet above the nearby Belle Fourche
River.
At just over two square miles (1,347 acres) the national
monument is actually quite small. It would be entirely possible to hike all of
its trail within a single day.
This all makes me wonder how they justify
charging $25 per car for admission.
Where they charge daily fees like that at other parks, it’s usually
places where you could easily spend several days to an entire week. Not that it’s relevant to me since I usually
get an $80 annual pass that covers all national parks and other federal lands.
The most popular trail in the monument is one I’ve done
before, the relatively level paved one that circles the base of the tower.
There are others that provide more distant views of the tower, but they seem a
bit more challenging. In most years there are typically over 1,000 ascents of
Devil’s Tower, a popular climbing destination. We saw a few such climbers on
their descent on the day of our visit. While it looks daunting to a non-climber
with a fear of heights like myself, for skilled climbers the scale of Devil’s
Tower is less than that of famous routes in Yosemite. The top of Devil’s Tower,
though, is one place I see no need to go.
2025-05-22