We wondered last night when the wind came up in the evening if there would be a change in the weather. We woke to an early morning thunderstorm and much cooler, cloudier weather along with wet chairs etc. We haven’t had to worry about rain so far on this trip. The cooler weather is welcome and the foliage is now beginning to take on fall colors.
Trying to minimize travel on hwy 90 we skirted Deadwood by way of Lead, SD, its twin city. a mining town in the Blackhills home to the Homestake Mine (??). We are familiar with mining towns in Northern Ontario and this looked about the same. A mining town is a mining town no matter where it is I guess.
From Lead, we took the Spearfish Scenic Byway along Spearfish Creek dotted with waterfalls and fishing areas. Scenery is magnificent, steep canyon walls on both sides.
We stopped for lunch at a pullout along the creek knowing that just further along the inevitable hwy 90 would be our route for the rest of the day. We finally finished up the hardboiled eggs from our hotel in Iowa accompanied by cheese, tomato, cucumber and of course, potato chips 🍟. It has turned out to be another gorgeous day with a clear blue sky. We stopped folding up our small backpackable chairs several days ago and just travel with them in the back upside down. Makes life a lot easier and gives us more flexibility with their usage.
We left the Ponderosa Pines of the Blackhills National Forest behind and back to endless prairie on Hwy 90 crossing into Wyoming.
We spent a couple of hours exploring Devils Tower, an absolutely fascinating geogical formation. It is easy to see how native people’s could invent stories of how it came to be.
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THE MYSTERY OF THE MOUNTAIN: LEGENDS OF DEVILS TOWER
Passed down through centuries of Native American history, sacred narratives surrounding the formation and spiritual significance of Devils Tower are still told today, preserved as a traditional part of American Indian culture across the region. Though some details vary across different tribes, many aspects of the First Stories of Devils Tower remain the same.
According to a Sioux legend, two young boys became lost trying to find their way home through the vast prairie. After some time, the boys realized that they were being followed, hunted by the ferocious and relentless Mato, an exceptionally giant bear! The boys ran from Mato for as long as they could, but found no place to hide in the low brush and open meadow. Soon, the massive bear was upon them, and in a final plea for rescue, the boys dropped to their knees and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them. Suddenly, the earth began to shake, and the boys found themselves lifted up into the sky by a giant pillar of rock! Determined, still, to catch them, Mato reared up onto his hind legs, clawing enormous, vertical striations into the stone as he tried to climb after the two boys, but they remained just beyond his reach. Mato tried and tried to reach them, covering every side of the mountain in the long cracks and scratches made by his claws. But try as he might, Mato could not catch the boys. Eventually, Mato retreated, exhausted and disappointed, leaving the two boys alone and frightened on top of the mountain. The story comes to a close as the two boys are carried back to their village on the wings of Wanblee, a giant eagle.
While some aspects of the Devils Tower legend are used across other variations, other tribes include different details. For example, the Kiowa tell the tale of a bear chasing seven maidens who are saved by the tower rising from the ground. However, instead of returning to their village, the girls ascend to the sky as stars, transforming into the Pleiades, or “Seven Sisters,” star cluster— which, if you choose to visit Devils Tower at night, are clearly visible right above the monument during the fall.
In the Arapaho legend, a young girl is transformed into a bear and injures her sister while chasing her siblings. When her sister does not recover, “Bear-Girl” climbs to the top of Devils Tower, abandoning her family to keep them safe. The Cheyenne tell the story of a group of warriors who hunt and defeat a bear spirit that has been terrorizing one of the women in their tribe. Though parts of the story change across the various tribes within the region, each includes the presence of a giant bear or group of bears to justify the vertical cracks along the surface of Devils Tower. Visitors can also spot Ursa Major, “The Great Bear” or “Big Dipper” star formation, just above Devils Tower in the night sky, along with many other significant star clusters and constellations referenced by the area’s Native American culture.
It is the reoccurring image of the bear across Native American sacred narratives that determined the original name of the monument, given by the surrounding Native American tribes— and it is a name that still holds much significance today.
Can you spot the climber? There are 200 climbing routes to the top.
Formation Theories
Geologists agree that Devils Tower began as magma, or molten rock buried beneath the Earth’s surface. What they cannot agree upon are the processes by which the magma cooled to form the Tower, or its relationship to the surrounding geology of the area. Numerous theories have been suggested to explain how Devils Tower formed. Geologists Carpenter and Russell studied Devils Tower in the late 1800s and concluded that the Tower was formed by an igneous intrusion (the forcible entry of magma through other rock layers). Later geologists searched for more detailed explanations.
The simplest explanation is that Devils Tower is a stock—a small intrusive body formed by magma which cooled underground and was later exposed by erosion (Figure 1). In 1907, scientists Darton and O’Hara decided that Devils Tower must be an eroded remnant of a laccolith. A laccolith is a large, mushroom-shaped mass of igneous rock which intrudes between the layers of sedimentary rocks but does not reach the surface. This produces a rounded bulge in the sedimentary layers above the intrusion (Figure 2). This idea was quite popular in the early 1900s when numerous studies were done on a number of laccoliths in the American southwest.
Other ideas have suggested that Devils Tower is a volcanic plug or that it is the neck of an extinct volcano (Figure 3). The limited evidence of volcanic activity (volcanic ash, lava fows, or volcanic debris) in the area creates doubt that the Tower was part of a volcanic system. It is possible that this material may simply have eroded away. In 2015, geologist Prokop Závada and his colleagues proposed their own hypothesis for the formation of the Tower. They compared it to a similar butte formation in the Czech Republic. Their hypothesis suggests that the Tower is the result of a maar-diatreme volcano (Figure 4). These form when magma encounters groundwater beneath the Earth’s surface. The super-heated water becomes steam. This steam expands explosively creating a crater on the surface. The crater fills with lava which cools and solidifes into a dome structure. Erosion wears away portions of the dome to create the Tower as we see it today.
The concept of erosion exposing the Tower is common to all of its modern formation theories. Ironically, the erosion which exposed the Tower also erased the evidence needed to determine which theory of Devils Tower’s formation is the correct one.
Theodore Roosevelt declared Devils Tower as the first national monument.
I have been wanting to make these for a few days now. The idea came from my youngest daughter who makes them for her son to eat on the bus to school. These are in mini bread pans: eggs, grated cheese, chopped onion, chopped pepper and tomato ( that both needed to be eaten up), and chopped ham. They smell delicious. I am so glad we brought the toaster oven. These will make excellent breakfasts for those mornings we want to eat somewhere besides the campsite… along with my homemade bread. Maybe tomorrow I will make peanut butter cookies, the chocolate chippers I baked and brought from home are gone.
While I was putting these together, 4 people wandered over to ask about the van. This is better than owning a dog for an attention getter.
Light rain tonight as soon as we finished eating outside. Everything now brought in for the night including the chairs. First time on the trip.
Louise and Brian McLeod Travel Blog 
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