A Thing to See in Wyoming
For instance, there's Devils Tower, a remnant mass of igneous rock that intruded into sedimentary layers 60 million years ago and was later exposed on the surface by erosion. It's a strange rock anyway, and its setting makes it weirder, because it stands all by itself out in the middle of a bunch of much more modest, gently rolling hills. The Tower, located well outside the Black Hills and long before you get to the Rocky Mountain front, rises 867 feet from its base atop a platform mesa. It's the tallest thing anywhere near here by a long shot. If you're a fan of '70s science fiction movies, you might recognize the rock as seen from this angle. This is where Steven Spielberg suggested the government had built a secret space port in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Richard Dreyfuss built a scale model of Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes.
In 1906, before the space port was built, President Theodore Roosevelt used the newly-minted Antiquities Act to declare Devils Tower the nation's first national monument, which is the designation the site still enjoys today. Though I'd stood at the entrance to the national monument twice before, I'd never gone past the gate and had technically never visited it. Those previous trips had come at a time when trips were much more tightly budgeted than they are now, and I didn't have the cash for the entrance fee. That's changed, though, and I rectified the problem this trip.
A Thing to See in Wyoming
For instance, there's Devils Tower, a remnant mass of igneous rock that intruded into sedimentary layers 60 million years ago and was later exposed on the surface by erosion. It's a strange rock anyway, and its setting makes it weirder, because it stands all by itself out in the middle of a bunch of much more modest, gently rolling hills. The Tower, located well outside the Black Hills and long before you get to the Rocky Mountain front, rises 867 feet from its base atop a platform mesa. It's the tallest thing anywhere near here by a long shot. If you're a fan of '70s science fiction movies, you might recognize the rock as seen from this angle. This is where Steven Spielberg suggested the government had built a secret space port in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Richard Dreyfuss built a scale model of Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes.
In 1906, before the space port was built, President Theodore Roosevelt used the newly-minted Antiquities Act to declare Devils Tower the nation's first national monument, which is the designation the site still enjoys today. Though I'd stood at the entrance to the national monument twice before, I'd never gone past the gate and had technically never visited it. Those previous trips had come at a time when trips were much more tightly budgeted than they are now, and I didn't have the cash for the entrance fee. That's changed, though, and I rectified the problem this trip.