Devils Tower in WY

Pulling into Wyoming!  Cool welcome center!!

Labor Day weekend lead us up the map to the North. We visited many amazing sites, the first of which was Devils tower in Wyoming. Our friends from Atlanta introduced us to the movie “Close Encounters of the third kind”. It’s a movie that came out in 1977.   It’s a very sllloooooww movie but it was so worth our time. In the movie aliens come to America and meet up at one of America’s famous landmark, Devils Tower. Since we saw it on the movie we were bound to see it in person. It’s an amazing site!!

So how did the tower come to be?? Here is the most popular Native American Legend that has been passed down thru the years.

One day, an Indian tribe was camped beside the river and seven small girls were playing at a distance. The region had a large bear population and one of those bears started to chase the girls. They ran back toward their village, the bear was getting closer and was about to catch the girls. Then the girls jumped upon a rock about three feet high and began to pray to the rock, “Rock, take pity on us’ Rock, save us.” The rock heard the pleas of the young girls and began to elongate itself upwards, pushing them higher and higher out of reach of the bear. The bear clawed and jumped at the sides of the rock, and even broke its claws and fell to the ground. The bear continued to jump at the rock until the girls were pushed up into the sky, where they are to this day in a group of seven littlest stars.

If you have ever seen the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" then you will recall the main actor, played by Richard Dreypfuss, created the tower from his mash potatoes.  The one characteristic of the tower he kept creating was the long columns.  So we got to see these columns first hand, and they were pretty cool!! But what seemed to amaze our family the most was the PEOPLE that were climbing them!  Look at the following picture and see if you can spot the rock climbers.  Those people are only about half way up the tower, but we witnessed climbers that had reached the top.  These people must have been abducted by aliens to do such a crazy thing.  The tower is 865 feet high!!! Yikes!!

Devils Tower is home to a population of Prairie Dogs.  There had to be millions.  Cute little animals.  Heston learned in his junior ranger program that they "kiss" to find out  if they are related. 

No alien encounters today!  Good bye Devils Tower, Hello Crazy Horse, our next stop on this long weekend camping trip.