No Aliens Were Encountered. Maybe Next Time….

We left the beautiful Custer State Park and made our way over the state line into Wyoming to cross another item off our bucket lists: Devil’s Tower. It is also known by other names given to it by the Native Americans, such as Bear’s Tipi, Home of the Bears, Bear’s Lodge, and a few others.

The bear-related names arise from one legend that a giant bear clawed grooves into the mountainside while chasing young Indian maidens. The name “Devil’s Tower” came from the mis-interpretation of the Natives’ name to mean “Bad God’s Tower.” It also has the distinction of being the first National Monument (not Park), designated as such by Teddy Roosevelt in 1906.

Devil’s Tower stands 5,112 ft/1559 m above sea level, and is 867 ft/265 m above the surrounding terrain, or a little over half the height of Shiprock (1583 ft/482 m) in northwestern New Mexico and nearly as tall as Cabezon Peak (1,100 ft/335 m) near Albuquerque. Both of those, like Devil’s Tower, are volcanic in origin.

The trail around Devil’s Tower took me a little over an hour to traverse, and was well worth the hike, despite the trail being a bit crowded at times. Each side of the monolith has its own look, and from some angles, doesn’t have the iconic shape that everyone knows from the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Looking away from the tower, I found an artist capturing the landscape to the west.

After visiting the monolith, we went in search of a place to camp for the night. This was to be our first night completely off the grid in the Revel. We took a tour down a couple gravel roads that were marked Open Range and had to share the road with Koda’s favorite kind of scenery: horses.

We settled on a place near the east fork of Blacktail Creek, where we had a mama cow and her babies as company for the night. Although we could hear the mooing, they stayed well away from us.

As we left for home the next morning, Rozanne got out to photograph some tepee’s on the side of the road. They turned out to be part of a campground where you could sleep inside one for the night.

Traveling south down Wyoming SH 14 the road got arrow-straight as we passed Keyhole Reservoir. Then we journeyed home through Colorado’s endless road construction on I-25 from north of Ft. Collins to south of Colorado Springs.