Devils Tower

Devils Tower stands in the Bear Lodge Ranger District of the Black Hills, near Hulett and Sundance in Crook County, northeastern Wyoming. It rises 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River, and its summit sits 5,112 feet above sea level. In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt made it the first national monument in the United States, and the monument now protects 1,347 acres around the base.

The tower is a laccolithic butte: magma pushed up into older sedimentary layers about 40.5 million years ago and cooled into phonolite porphyry, a gray to greenish rock with white feldspar crystals. As it cooled it split into long columns, mostly six-sided, up to 20 feet wide and 600 feet tall. Rain, snow and ice keep working at the cracks, and the piles of broken columns at the base show that the tower was once wider than it is now. The red sandstone and siltstone along the river belong to the older rocks it pushed into.

Many nations know the tower by names that point to bears or to the rock itself: Bear's Lodge, Home of the Bears, Aloft on a Rock (Kiowa), Tree Rock. In Lakota and Cheyenne it is Matȟó Thípila. The English name came in 1875, when an expedition led by Colonel Richard Dodge recorded it as Devil's Tower after an interpreter reportedly misunderstood a native name. Proposals in 2005 and 2014 to add or restore the name Bear Lodge were discussed publicly, and the name was not changed.

In Kiowa and Lakota accounts, girls climbed onto a rock to escape giant bears; the rock rose toward the sky, and the bears' claws left the grooves seen on its sides. In one version the girls become the stars of the Pleiades. Cheyenne accounts tell the story differently, and the Northern Cheyenne also link the tower to a sacred buffalo head. The writer N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa, wove the bear story into his 1989 novel The Ancient Child.

The first documented non-Native visitors were part of an 1859 expedition to Yellowstone. Congress set the area aside as a forest reserve in 1892. The first known climb was on July 4, 1893, by two local ranchers who drove wooden pegs into the cracks to make a ladder. Some of those pegs are still on the rock and can be seen from the Tower Trail, 1.3 miles long.