AWESOME Devil's Tower AWESOME 7/12/2010

I MADE IT....1.3 MILES AROUND THE BASE OF DEVILS TOWER...........YIPEEEEEEEE





This morning we headed north about 28 miles to see Devils Tower National Monument. There was 1 Virtual and 2 Earthcaches there that we wanted to do as well as seeing the Tower. We started out with our first cache in the campgrounds we are staying in and then 2 caches along the way to the Tower both at pull offs along the road, one 10 miles away and the other 3 miles away, and both views were lovely and again awesome. We got there and finally found a place to park as it was very busy and started our walk around the base which as I said is 1.3 miles. We took our time and stopped and rested quite a bit as this long a walk all at once is unusual for me. It was a nice walk with some moderate hills to climb but not awfully bad. Devils Tower is really AWESOME and unless you see it in person you can't really appreciate it. We did our caches along the way, taking our pictures and finding answers to some questions. We did see 3 sets of climbers way up the Tower and I did label the pictures as to which ones had the climbers in them. You may have to click on the picture and enlarge it and look close as they are way up and very small.



Devils Tower (Lakota: Mato Tipila, which means “Bear Lodge”) is a monolithic igneous intrusion or volcanic neck located in the Black Hills near Hulett and Sundance in Crook County, northeastern Wyoming, above the Belle Fourche River. It rises dramatically 1,267 feet above the surrounding terrain and the summit is 5,112 feet above sea level.
Devils Tower was the first declared United States National Monument, established on September 24, 1906, by President Theodore Roosevelt. The Monument's boundary encloses an area of 1,347 acres.
In recent years about 1% of the Monument's 400,000 annual visitors climb Devils Tower, mostly through traditional climbing techniques.
Tribes including the Arapaho, Crow, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Lakota, and Shoshone had cultural and geographical ties to the monolith before European and early American immigrants reached Wyoming. Their names for the monolith include: Aloft on a Rock (Kiowa), Bear's House (Cheyenne, Crow), Bear's Lair (Cheyenne, Crow), Bear's Lodge (Cheyenne, Lakota), Bear's Lodge Butte (Lakota), Bear's Tipi (Arapaho, Cheyenne), Tree Rock (Kiowa), and Grizzly Bear Lodge (Lakota).
The name Devil's Tower originated in 1875 during an expedition led by Col. Richard Irving Dodge when his interpreter misinterpreted the name to mean Bad God's Tower. This was later shortened to the Devil's Tower. All information signs in that area use the name "Devils Tower", following a geographic naming standard whereby the apostrophe is eliminated.
In 2005, a proposal to recognize several American Indian ties through the additional designation of the monolith as Bear Lodge National Historic Landmark met with opposition from the US Representative Barbara Cubin, arguing that a "name change will harm the tourist trade and bring economic hardship to area communities".
The landscape surrounding Devils Tower is composed mostly of sedimentary rocks.
The oldest rocks visible in Devils Tower National Monument were laid down in a shallow sea during the Triassic period, 225 to 195 million years ago. This dark red sandstone and maroon siltstone, interbedded with shale, can be seen along the Belle Fourche River. Oxidation of iron minerals causes the redness of the rocks. This rock layer is known as the Spearfish Formation.
Above the Spearfish formation is a thin band of white gypsum, called the Gypsum Springs Formation. This layer of gypsum was deposited during the Jurassic period, 195 to 136 million years ago.
Created as sea levels and climates repeatedly changed, gray-green shales (deposited in low-oxygen environments such as marshes) were interbedded with fine-grained sandstones, limestones, and sometimes thin beds of red mudstone. This composition, called the Stockade Beaver member, is part of the Sundance Formation. The Hulett Sandstone member, also part of the Sundance formation, is composed of yellow fine-grained sandstone. Resistant to weathering, it forms the nearly vertical cliffs which encircle the Tower itself.
About 65 million years ago, during the Tertiary period, the Rocky Mountains and the Black Hills were uplifted. Magma rose through the crust, intruding into the existing sedimentary rock layers.
Geologists agree that Devils Tower was formed by the intrusion of igneous material. What they cannot agree upon is how, exactly, that process took place. Geologists Carpenter and Russell studied Devils Tower in the late 1800s and came to the conclusion that the Tower was indeed formed by an igneous intrusion. Later geologists searched for further explanations. Several geologists believe the molten rock comprising the Tower might not have surfaced; other researchers are convinced the tower is all that remains of what once was a large explosive volcano.
In 1907, scientists Darton and O'Hara decided that Devils Tower must be an eroded remnant of a laccolith. A laccolith is a large mass of igneous rock which is intruded through sedimentary rock beds but does not actually reach the surface, producing a rounded bulge in the sedimentary layers above. This theory was quite popular in the early 1900s since numerous studies had earlier been done on a number of laccoliths in the Southwest.
Other theories have suggested that Devils Tower is a volcanic plug or that it is the neck of an extinct volcano. Presumably, if Devils Tower was a volcanic plug, any volcanics created by it — volcanic ash, lava flows, volcanic debris — would have been eroded away long ago. Some pyroclastic material of the same age as Devils Tower has been identified elsewhere in Wyoming.
Geologists classify the igneous material as phonolite porphyry, a light to dark-gray or greenish-gray igneous trachyte rock with conspicuous crystals of white feldspar. As the lava cooled, hexagonal (and sometimes 4-, 5-, and 7-sided) columns formed. As the rock continued to cool, the vertical columns shrank horizontally in volume and cracks began to occur at 120 degree angles, generally forming compact 6-sided columns. Superficially similar, but with typically 2 feet diameter columns, Devils Postpile National Monument and Giant's Causeway are columnar basalt.
Devils Tower did not visibly protrude out of the landscape until the overlying sedimentary rocks eroded away. As the elements wore down the softer sandstones and shales, the more resistant igneous rock making up the tower survived the erosional forces. As a result, the gray columns of Devils Tower began to appear as an isolated mass above the landscape.
As rain and snow continue to erode the sedimentary rocks surrounding the Tower's base, more of Devils Tower will be exposed. Nonetheless, the exposed portions of the Tower still experience certain amounts of erosion. Cracks along the columns are subject to water and ice erosion. Erosion due to the expansion of ice along cracks and fractures within rock formations is common in colder climates — a prime example being the featured formations at Bryce Canyon National Park. Portions, or even entire columns, of rock at Devils Tower are continually breaking off and falling. Piles of broken columns, boulders, small rocks, and stones — or scree — lie at the base of the tower, indicating that it was once wider than it is today.
American Indian legends tell of six Lakota Sioux girls who were picking flowers when they were chased by bears. Feeling sorry for them, the Great Spirit raised the ground beneath the girls. The bears tried to climb the rock, but fell off, leaving their scratch marks on the sides.
Another Native American tribe, the Kiowa, had a myth similar to the Lakota's. According to the Kiowa, seven little girls went out to play and were spotted by several giant bears, who began to chase them. In an effort to escape the bears, the girls climbed atop a rock, fell to their knees and prayed to Great Spirit to save them. Hearing their prayers, the Great Spirit made the rock to rise from the ground towards the Heavens so that the bears could not reach the girls. The bears, in an effort to climb the rock, left deep claw marks in the sides which had become too steep to climb. (Those are the marks which appear today on the sides of Devils Tower.) When the girls reached the sky, they were turned into the star constellation the Pleiades.
Another version tells that two Sioux boys wandered far from their village when Mato the bear, a huge creature that had claws the size of teepee poles, spotted them, and wanted to eat them for breakfast. He was almost upon them when the boys prayed to Wakan Tanka the Creator to help them. They rose up on a huge rock, while Mato tried to get up from every side, leaving huge scratch marks as he did. Finally, he sauntered off, disappointed and discouraged. The bear came to rest east of the Black Hills at what is now Bear Butte. Wanblee, the eagle, helped the boys off the rock and back to their village. A painting depicting this legend by artist Herbert A. Collins hangs over the fireplace in the visitor's center at Devils Tower.
Wooden Leg, a Northern Cheyenne, relates another legend told to him by an old man as they were traveling together past the monument. An Indian man decided to sleep at the base of Bear Lodge next to a buffalo head. In the morning he found that both himself and the buffalo head had been transported to the top of the rock by the Great Medicine with no way down. He spent another day and night on the rock with no food or water. After he had prayed all day and then gone to sleep, he awoke to find that the Great Medicine had brought him back down to the ground, but left the buffalo head at the top near the edge. Wooden Leg maintains that the buffalo head was clearly visible through the old man's spyglass.
The buffalo head gives this story special significance for the Northern Cheyenne. All the Cheyenne maintained in their camps a sacred teepee to the Great Medicine containing the tribal sacred objects. In the case of the Northern Cheyenne, the sacred object was a buffalo head.
Fur trappers may have visited Devils Tower, but they left no written evidence of having done so. The first documented visitors were several members of Captain W. F. Raynold's 1859 Yellowstone Expedition. Sixteen years later, Colonel Richard I. Dodge led a U.S. Geological Survey party to the massive rock formation and coined the name Devils Tower. Recognizing its unique characteristics, Congress designated the area a U.S. forest reserve in 1892 and in 1906 Devil's Tower became the nation's first National Monument.
The 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind used the formation as a plot element and as a location for its contact scene and climactic scenes.
In recent years, climbing Devils Tower National Monument has increased in popularity. The first known ascent of Devils Tower by any method occurred on July 4, 1893, and is accredited to William Rogers and Willard Ripley, local ranchers in the area. They completed this first ascent after constructing a ladder of wooden pegs driven into cracks in the rock face. A few of these wooden pegs are still intact and are visible on the tower when hiking along the 1.3-mile Tower Trail at Devils Tower National Monument. Over the following thirty years many climbs were made using this method before the ladder fell into disrepair. The man most famous for climbing the tower is Fritz Wiessner who summited with William House and Lawrence Coveney in 1937. This was the first ascent using modern climbing techniques. Wiessner led the entire climb free, placing only a single piece of fixed gear (piton) which he later regretted, deeming it unnecessary.
Today hundreds of climbers scale the sheer rock walls of Devils Tower each summer. The most common route is the Durrance Route which was the second free route established in 1938. Today there are many established and documented climbing routes covering every side of the tower, ascending the various vertical cracks and columns of the rock. The difficulty of these routes range from relatively easy to some of the hardest in the world. All climbers are required to register with a park ranger before and after attempting a climb.
The Tower is sacred to several Native American Plains tribes, including the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Kiowa. Because of this, many Indian leaders objected to climbers ascending the monument, considering this to be a desecration. The climbers argued that they had a right to climb the Tower, since it is on federal land. A compromise was eventually reached with a voluntary climbing ban during the month of June when the tribes are conducting ceremonies around the monument. Climbers are asked, but not required, to stay off the Tower in June. According to the PBS documentary In the Light of Reverence, approximately 85% of climbers honor the ban and voluntarily choose not to climb the Tower during the month of June. However, several climbers along with the Mountain States Legal Foundation sued the Park Service, claiming an inappropriate government entanglement with religion.



The Ladder at Devils Tower was first constructed and used in 1893 by William Rogers and Willard Ripley to publicly ascend Devil's Tower. Two years later Roger's wife Linnie ascended the tower via the ladder, one of a total of about 215 who have used the ladder. The last use was by Babe "The Human Fly" White in 1927.
The present tower ladder consists of a series of wooden stakes connected on the outside by vertical wood planks. One end of each stake is driven sideways into a rock crevice, vertically ascending the southeast side of the tower. Attached with nails and/or bailing wire to the other end of the stakes are 12-inch lengths of 1 x 4 - inch lumber. The ladder ascends from about 100 feet above the ground to the summit, and is about 170 feet long. Because of its small scale in comparison to the tower, it is very difficult to see in modern photographs, and visitors to the tower usually must view it through a telescope. The lowest 100 feet were removed in the 1930s as a safety measure. The remaining ladder was restored in 1972.



After we were done walking around the base and doing our caches we were off out of the park but on the way out we stopped to see the prairie dog village along the way.


Black-tailed prairie dogs once ranged the Great Plains from southern Saskatchewan to northern Mexico. Originally named "petits chiens," or "little dogs," by early French explorers, these highly social animals are not really dogs, but rodents. They are members of the Sciuridae or squirrel family, closely related to ground squirrels, chipmunks, woodchucks and marmots. There are five different species of prairie dogs, but only the black-tailed prairie dog inhabits Devils Tower National Monument.
Prairie dogs are small, short-tailed animals with eyes and small ears set far back on their heads. Their light-brown fur blends well with the dirt of their mounds except when the animal has been blackened by burrowing into coal seams. Named for their bark-like warning call and black-tipped tail, prairie dogs average 14 to 17 inches in total length and weigh 1 to 3 pounds. With short, muscular legs and long-nailed toes on their front and hind feet, they are well equipped for a burrowing lifestyle.
A prairie dog colony or "town" consists of a large number of closely spaced burrows, each comprising an elaborate network of interconnecting tunnels and multiple entrance holes that provide escape routes from pursuing predators. The primary prairie dog social unit is the "coterie," an acre or so of territory with 50 to 60 burrow entrances that is occupied by a single family group. A coterie typically consists of one adult male, several adult females, and their offspring. Members of a coterie are a closely knit group, recognizing each other by an identifying kiss or sniff. Their cohesiveness is maintained by the cooperative activities of raising young, constructing burrows, grooming, playing and defending the coterie territory. The dominant male is typically the most active in the defense of the coterie, patrolling its invisible borders and challenging all comers. Prairie dogs warn of territorial trespassers from adjacent coteries or approaching danger by emitting a series of "barks," which sound more like high-pitched squeaks. Specific threats are associated with distinctive vocalization patterns that serve to alert all residents of a town to the common threat.
Prairie dogs feed primarily on plants, selecting forbs (flowering plants not shrubs or trees) and grasses high in moisture content and nutritive value to supply their needs for water and energy. Grasses, far less resistant to foraging pressure than forbs, quickly disappear from the town, which takes on a barren and overgrazed appearance. The open, closely-cropped terrain promotes easier social contacts and enables the collective "thousand eyes" of the residents to better spot approaching danger. With reduced competition from grass species, forbs begin to increase in abundance, and soon are joined by invading "weedy" plants like thistle and sage. Pronghorn and deer are attracted to feed in this modified community, their trampling further compacts the soil to maintain forb growth. Varying its diet so as not to feed on one species of plant exclusively, the prairie dog practices its own brand of crop rotation. Forage pressure on preferred plants is kept at tolerable levels and the community thrives. This balance may be upset by climatic changes that, if persistent, could force prairie dogs to abandon a town. Recolonization may recur later when a more favorable environment has allowed the former plant community to recover.
Prairie dogs build up large stores of body fat to carry them through the fall and winter months. Unlike most other members of their family, black-tailed prairie dogs do not hibernate. They may remain underground for several days during periods of harsh weather, but a return to milder winter conditions will find their towns bustling with activity.
Mating occurs from March to early April. After a month-long gestation period, the female bears a litter of one to six young. Born blind and hairless, the pups stay in the burrow for about six weeks while they develop fully. Emerging from the burrow, young prairie dogs are initially protected by their mothers. Weaning occurs shortly thereafter, when the pups have begun to forage for themselves. Most animals spend their brief five- to seven-year existence within the coteries of a single town.
Plump prairie dogs are an important component of the diet of many animals. Badgers, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, golden eagles.and various hawks all take their toll; rattlesnakes and bullsnakes occasionally prey on the young. Prairie dogs rely on their excellent hearing and vision to avoid these predators. From their vantage point atop the burrow mound, they can listen and scan the sky and prairie for danger. Upon spotting an enemy and announcing its presence to the rest of the town, the prairie dog dives into its burrow, emerging to give an "all clear" call when the danger has passed.
The number of prairie dogs a given area can support at any one time is based on the prevailing relations between a number of interacting environmental factors, one of which is predation. Other environmental pressures--weather changes, shifts in the availability of edible plants, outbreaks of disease -- all affect the size of prairie dog populations. If, for example, predators fail to keep the numbers of prairie dogs in check, a population "boom" will occur. The environmental balance is inevitably restored by a subsequent population "bust," animals dying in large numbers from disease or starvation brought about by overcrowding and exhaustion of the town's food resources.
The prairie dog was once a major component of Great Plains life. Vast prairie dog towns stretched for miles across the open plains. In 1901, scientists surveyed a single Texas "dog town" that covered an area of 25,000 square miles and contained an estimated 400,000,000 prairie dogs. But this town and others were already under sentences of death. Prairie dog burrows proved dangerous for horses and wandering livestock and most ranchers were convinced that prairie dogs were destroying rangelands and competing with cattle for food. Reluctance to acknowledge that poor livestock management practices and the wholesale elimination of prairie dog predators were at least contributing factors to the problem prompted extensive poisoning programs. These measures virtually eradicated the prairie dog and many of its predators, chief among them the black-footed ferret. Formerly the prairie dog's most dangerous enemy, ferret numbers have only recently been raised through captive breeding programs to a level where small populations are now being released back into the wild. Today, scattered populations of prairie dogs are found mainly in protected areas such as state and national parks, monuments, grasslands, and wildlife refuges.

We saw many many of them on both sides of the road as they were playing, fighting and eating. Then we stopped at the Outpost and got a couple of souvenirs and headed back to the coach. I took a couple of naps by the way as I was kind of tired after that walk. Well that's about all for today so until tomorrow we miss and love you all. Mom & Dad Dori & Dick