![]() (While visiting the park, make sure not to touch or move any religious artifacts.) 2. To this day, Devils Tower is frequently the site of ceremonial rituals, including sun dances, sweat lodges, and prayer and artifact offerings. It appears in multiple oral histories and sacred narratives, and is also known by multiple ancient names.įor example, the Arapahoe call Devils Tower “Bear’s Tipi” the Kiowa refer to it as "Aloft on a Rock” or "Tree Rock” and the Lakota people know it as "Bear Lodge," "Bear Lodge Butte," "Grizzly Bear's Lodge," "Mythic-owl Mountain," "Grey Horn Butte," and "Ghost Mountain.” However, it’s commonly referred to as “ Mateo Tepee,” which is likely Sioux for “Bear Wigwam,” or “Bear Lodge.” (Long ago, the surrounding region was home to many bears.) To the Northern Plains Indian Tribes, Devils Tower isn’t just a stunning landmark-it’s a sacred place. DEVILS TOWER IS SACRED TO MANY NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES. That said, there’s a lot more to this natural wonder than what you’ve seen on the silver screen. Thanks to the film’s upcoming 40th anniversary-which will be celebrated with a theatrical re-release, a special Labor Day weekend screening at the base of Devils Tower itself, and other festivities-the iconic butte is back in the limelight. The dramatic butte-which towers 1267 feet above the plains of northeastern Wyoming and the Belle Fourche River-was famously featured in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, culminating in a scene in which an alien mothership descended upon the rock formation. In Japanese, "unite" is "subaru.Steven Spielberg fans are likely familiar with Devils Tower, even if they don’t know it by name. Fun aside: The Japanese only saw six stars, and called it Mutsuaboshi-though its nickname, "Unite," became the name, and symbol, of a famous car company. Astronomers-who gave it the dull designation of "M45"-say there are actually at least 1,000 stars in this open cluster. (The Native Americans, who saw Nine Maidens in the stars, must have simply had better eyesight than the ancient Europeans, who saw Seven Sisters. He raised the rock straight up out of the ground as a column, allowing the maidens to ascend into the sky and become what we call the Pleiades constellation. Long before Steven Speilberg made Devils Tower the alien landing pad in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Lakota legend held that the fluted sides of Devils Tower were caused by a mighty bear raking the rock with his claws in an attempt to reach nine maidens who clambered onto a rock, praying to the Great Spirit to save them. ![]() ![]() It is site that had lent itself to myths and legends for centuries. ![]() It is either the plug from the core of a long-vanished volcano (a theory supported by the face that it sprouts from teh middle of a large, flat mesa that might once have been the base of the volcano), or an igneous intrusion into the sedimentary layers called a laccolith.Įither way, it took millennia for the sedimantary layers all around it to erode away, leaving this much harder igneous rock still standing to be gawked at by more than 400,000 visitors each year (and climbed by about 4,000). What it is doing in the middle of the sedimentary plains has been debated by geologists for nearly 150 years. (A typo in the Act of Congress establishing it as America's first National Monument back in 1906 accidentally left out the apostraphe, so it is not, in fact, spelled "Devil's Tower").ĭevils Tower is a mass of 40-million-year-old phonolite porphyry, fractured into hexagonal columns that give it its famous vertical groovy texture. There's no mistaking it: rising 1,267 feet out of the plains leading to the Black Hills like the stump of some titanic petrified tree. A volcanic plug of a platform-mountain rising from the plains of Wyoming
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