Devils Tower in Wyoming: The First National Monument, the Bear Lodge, and the Geology Nobody Has Fully Figured Out
Theodore Roosevelt declared Devils Tower in Wyoming the first U.S. national monument in 1906. The rock has been climbed by over 5,000 people, prayed at by more
Devils Tower in Wyoming is the kind of place you can spot from miles away, a weird, columned chunk of rock rising 867 feet above its base like it showed up late and nobody asked questions.
But the story gets complicated fast. Long before European maps, the Lakota called it Mato Tipila, Bear Lodge, and other Nations across the Northern Plains had their own names, most tied to bears. The traditional tale says a group of young girls got chased by an enormous bear, prayed on a small rock, and the rock became something else entirely.
Now you’re standing in a landscape that looks like geology, feels like myth, and still has scientists arguing about one missing piece.
Where is Devil's Tower in Wyoming
Devils Tower sits in Crook County in the far northeastern corner of Wyoming, near the Belle Fourche River. The closest towns are Hulett and Sundance. Gillette is about an hour southwest.
The monument grounds cover about two square miles, per Britannica. The tower rises 867 feet above its base and 1,267 feet above the river below. The summit is roughly the size of a football field. It is, by any honest measure, hard to miss.
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The tower’s sheer size, 1,267 feet above the river, is the first clue that this is more than a pretty view near Hulett and Sundance.
The Geology of Wyoming's Devils Tower
The current scientific consensus is that Devils Tower in Wyoming is an igneous intrusion: molten rock that pushed up through softer surrounding sedimentary rock, cooled underground, and was later exposed when the softer rock eroded away. The tower is made of a rare type called phonolite porphyry, per the EBSCO research summary. Phonolite makes a metallic sound when struck.
The columns themselves formed as the magma cooled. Contracting molten rock cracks into polygonal columns, mostly pentagonal or hexagonal. The same physics produces the hexagonal patterns at the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland and the dried salt geometry of Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni, but Devils Tower's columns are larger, some over 600 feet tall and 8 feet across at the base.
What scientists don't fully agree on is how the original magma reached its position. Theories include a volcanic neck, a laccolith, and a maar-diatreme. USGS Bulletin 1021-I didn't resolve the question. Neither has anything published since. The rock is roughly 50 to 60 million years old.
The Bear Lodge Name
Long before European contact, the rock was a sacred site for ceremony and vision quests across the Northern Plains. The Lakota call it Mato Tipila, meaning Bear Lodge. The Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, Crow, and Kiowa have their own names. Most reference bears.
The traditional story common across several tribes describes a group of young girls being chased by an enormous bear. They climbed onto a small rock, prayed, and the rock grew higher and higher to lift them out of reach. The bear's claws raked the sides as it tried to climb after them, leaving the vertical column marks that score the tower today.
The name Devils Tower comes from an 1875 military expedition led by Lieutenant Colonel Richard Dodge. His translator misinterpreted a Native American name as "Bad God's Tower," per Rock & Gem Magazine. The apostrophe was lost later through a clerical error in the 1906 declaration. The official name today is Devils Tower, not Devil's Tower, by typo and by policy.
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While the columns crack into pentagons and hexagons as magma cooled, the Bear Lodge stories claim the rock was changed for a reason, not just by erosion.
This hoax energy is similar to the Cardiff Giant, where a preacher and an atheist argued over a dinner-table lie.
The First National Monument
The Antiquities Act was signed by Roosevelt in June 1906. Within weeks, he used it to designate Devils Tower as the first national monument in U.S. history. The Act gives the president unilateral power to set aside federal land for protection without congressional approval, which made it controversial then and remains controversial now.
A Wyoming senator had petitioned to make the area a national park as early as 1892. Congress didn't act. Roosevelt didn't ask. Sixteen years of legislative inaction got resolved in a single executive order.
Roosevelt used the same Antiquities Act over the next two and a half years to set aside the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and 15 other national monuments. A few of those designations have generated the kind of controversy that still attaches to remote and contested places where land use, sovereignty, and memory overlap.
Climbing Wyoming's Devils Tower
The first recorded ascent was in July 1893. Two local ranchers, William Rogers and Willard Ripley, drove wooden pegs into a vertical crack to create a ladder of sorts.
They got to the top. Modern climbing started in earnest after Fritz Wiessner's 1937 free ascent. Today, more than 5,000 climbers attempt Devils Tower each year on over 220 named routes, most of them crack climbs of varying difficulty.
The National Park Service began a voluntary climbing closure in June each year starting in 1995, per Britannica, out of respect for the religious ceremonies many tribes conduct during that month. Most climbers comply. The closure is voluntary, not enforced. The compromise has held for three decades.
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That’s where it gets messy, even the “igneous intrusion” explanation can’t fully pin down how the magma reached its spot, like the last chapter got lost.
And once you remember the Lakota name Mato Tipila alongside the other bear-linked names, the whole monument starts to feel like it’s been telling two stories at once for 50 to 60 million years.
The Close Encounters Effect
In 1977, Steven Spielberg used Devils Tower as the climactic landing site for the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Richard Dreyfuss sculpts the shape out of mashed potatoes in one scene.
Visitor numbers spiked after the film and never fully fell back. Most tourists today know the rock primarily from that movie. The tower keeps doing what it always did. Standing there. Looking strange. Catching lightning storms that roll across the high plains in summer.
The pop culture association with extraterrestrials sometimes spills into adjacent speculation, including some of the unresolved questions about Andean mummies and other archaeological oddities. None of that is what Devils Tower in Wyoming actually is. It is older, stranger, and entirely terrestrial.
What Makes Devils Tower in Wyoming Different
Most natural monuments fit cleanly into one category. Devils Tower doesn't. It's a geological feature scientists still debate. It's a sacred site to more than 20 tribes. It's the first national monument in American history. It's a major rock climbing destination. It's a movie landmark. The same square mile of land carries all of those identities at once, and none of them cancels the others out.
The same overlap shows up at other one-of-a-kind landscapes, including Poland's strangely bent Crooked Forest. What makes Devils Tower in Wyoming different is how compact it is. One rock. One name argument. One geological mystery. One photograph everyone recognizes.
Stand at the base and look up. You're looking at a piece of cooled magma that has been there for 50 million years, a religious site that predates writing, and the first piece of American land Congress decided to protect from itself.
The bear myth says the rock saved them, and the geology still can’t fully explain how it got there, so you end up believing both.
Think the “Devil” angle is intense here, wait until you read about Turkmenistan’s burning crater, a door to hell that locals claim won’t quit.
