Devils Tower

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So, continuing on our magical mystery tour of the Black Hills, we decided Tuesday to use our extra day in Rapid City to take in Devils Tower.

Devils Tower is possibly the most extreme example of a single granite rock rising up through the skin of the earth. You probably remember it from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but let me remind you that it is one solid, relatively cylindrical stone with nearly vertical, grooved sides rising out of a landscape of rolling hills, with no other “mountain” around it. The movie does a pretty good job of communicating its size. You can see it from quite far away.

What I found most interesting is that there are several different scientific explanations for how it was formed, not to mention a wonderful Native American legend: Indian children were pursued by a bear who, in trying to climb the sides of the mountain, created those vertical grooves by scratching the sides with its claws as it climbed, then slid back down the sides. This led to the name “Bear Lodge” being given to the formation. Its name was changed by white settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Park Service calls those grooves “columns,” by the way, but they look more like reverse columns, being concave, usually, rather than convex. The rangers have no real explanation for how any them were formed. The tower has belonged to the Park Service for a long time, having been the very first National Monument.

There’s not much more to do there than look at the tower. There is a trail that surrounds the base, but I didn’t walk it, fearing it would be too long and too rough for my abilities. John did, however, and he said there is one point where you can actually touch the bottom of one of the columns and look straight up the side of the mountain.

I suspect my vertigo would have made that quite uncomfortable. I know, how can vertigo affect you when you’re at the bottom of a wall, you wonder. I don’t know. I just know that it does if the wall is tall enough. I don’t like being too close to monolithic heights from any perspective. And it gets worse every year.

As much as Devils Tower is a natural wonder, however, there doesn’t appear to be much study of it going on. If there are measurements and samples being taken, there is no visible sign of it. Every year, a certain number of climbers scale the sides, but that is being discouraged more and more. There’s always the danger of an accident and, anyway, Native Americans consider it sacrilegious.

That restraint on the part of the Park Service and the public at large fascinates me. We are a people who think nothing of carving up a mountain, yet we recognize the uniqueness of this natural object and seek to maintain that uniqueness.

What do those two sides to our behavior have to say about our characters?
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