With the sun low in the foothills at the horizon, I parked the car at Bear Lodge Butte (commonly known as Devils Tower) and started toward the scree field at its base. The face I approached was hit square by the setting sun—one wall of the great gray laccolith lit golden. Pronghorn grazed between Ponderosa pines draped with colorful prayer flags.
An igneous intrusion like the Stawamus Chief, Bear Lodge formed about 40.5 million years ago when magma rose from the earth’s soft mantle, but cooled and hardened into hexagonal columns before penetrating its crust (contrast this with extrusion, or volcanic eruption, like that which gave violent birth to Yellowstone). Over time, the weak sedimentary rock that buried the pluton eroded, excavating the Lodge from the bowels of the earth. Today it looms over the flat basin landscape like a titan, nine hundred feet tall.
In several Native traditions, a colossal bear chased a group of children up the steep wall of the tower. The bear scraped at the stone with its claws, leaving the hexagonal striations we see today. The Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Oglala Lakota consider Bear Lodge sacred, and believe that climbing it is an act of desecration. Though unsuccessful in achieving a climbing ban, the tribes were able to win a “voluntary ban” for the month of June, when most of their prayer ceremonies are held here. For one month, only the least respectful 15% of outdoor adventurers, the kind of people who need to conquer shit to feel validated, insist on profaning the place. To me this sounds like sticking pitons into the Western Wall or the flying buttresses of Nôtre-Dame, but I’m not much of a climber.
Natives, of course, don’t call it Devils Tower. This is a white man’s name and one which, like Sioux for the Oglala Lakota, seems designed specifically to spit in the face of a marginalized people. Recent efforts to change the name to something less deliberately offensive were stymied in court, due to fears from the Tourism Board that doing so might, “Hurt the Wyoming brand.” How peabrained are the tourists in this scenario, that a name change throws them off the trail of the one thing taller than a horse in Crook County?
I loathe this notion that everyone and everything must have a brand now, but I suppose this orneriness is just a part of my personal brand, and I should do my best to cultivate it on social media.
I left Bear Lodge as the sun went down, catching one last glimpse on the road out—a black silhouette against a white sky rapidly grading to purple.
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This is the sixth post in a cross-country road trip series. To start from the beginning, click here!
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