Devils Tower, Wyoming
44°35′N, 104°43′W — Crook County, northeastern Wyoming — Bear Lodge Ranger District, Black Hills National Forest
What's documented
Devils Tower is a butte of igneous rock — a phonolite porphyry laccolith — rising 264 meters above the surrounding Belle Fourche River valley in northeastern Wyoming. The first U.S. National Monument, designated by President Theodore Roosevelt on 24 September 1906. Sacred to over 20 Plains tribes, who know the formation as Bear Lodge (Mato Tipila in Lakota). The tower featured prominently in Steven Spielberg's 1977 film 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' for which the climactic landing sequence was filmed at the site.
Notable & intriguing
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The name 'Devils Tower' derives from an 1875 expedition led by Col. Richard Irving Dodge, whose interpreter mistranslated the Lakota 'Mato Tipila' (Bear Lodge) as 'Bad God's Tower.' The original name is used by the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Crow, and Arapaho. A petition by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe to restore the name 'Bear Lodge' is pending before the U.S. Board on Geographic Names since 2014.
Dodge, 'The Black Hills' (1876); USBGN docket, Devils Tower NM
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Climbing of the formation is voluntarily suspended each June out of respect for Native American religious ceremonies. The Bear's Lodge Multiple Use Area plan (1995) was upheld in Bear Lodge Multiple Use Association v. Babbitt (10th Circuit, 1999) against an Establishment Clause challenge.
Bear Lodge Multiple Use Association v. Babbitt, 175 F.3d 814 (10th Cir. 1999)
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George Hopkins parachuted onto the summit of Devils Tower on 1 October 1941 on a bet. His escape rope, dropped separately, missed the tower. Hopkins was stranded on the summit for six days through a snowstorm; food and supplies were dropped to him by aircraft. He was rescued on 6 October 1941 by a climbing team led by Jack Durrance.
Casper Star-Tribune, 2-7 October 1941
Public-record imagery
