If Nature is a Church, Devil's Tower is a Cathedral

This singular natural wonder is not just for alien landings

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The darkness that enveloped the Black Hills of South Dakota when I arrived is erased by the bright morning sun of a clear day. I don’t expect it to be as warm as it is when I bring my gear out and pack up my car.

Annie, the lady who owns the house I rented a room in for the night, kindly offers me coffee from her Keurig, but I’m not a fan of pod coffee and I really want to get on the road. I’m getting a later start than I would have liked, and I’ve got a long way to go today.

I wind my way down the road from Annie’s Airbnb in search of some to-go caffeine and maybe a little breakfast. I don’t usually eat much first thing, but I have the feeling it’s going to be a long day on a lot of barren road, so I’m considering just getting something now, while the getting is good.

The problem is that I’m on the Western outskirts of Rapid City, and heading further West. There’s just not much on this side of town outside of some equipment shops and a couple of gas stations, and before I know it, I’m past any hope of grub and on the highway again, zooming off towards the Wyoming State line, a little less than 40 miles away.

My goal today is to make it to Grand Teton National park, or at least to one of the nearby towns. It’s a 500 mile trip, so with stops, I’ll most likely be getting in after sunset, but I’m willing to roll the dice and see what happens.

For whatever reason, Grand Teton is the only solid destination I’ve had in my mind since I started this trip. I’ve got a map of other national parks in the Northwest, and as much as I’d love to see them all, it’s a lot of ground to cover, and it’s getting late in the season for the places at higher elevations. I’ve heard that Crater Lake has already had its first significant snow accumulation, and some of the roads out there might not be passable, especially if the federal shutdown has the plows offline. Details on such things are spotty from afar, and I’d hate to drive a couple days to get somewhere and not be able to get in.

I seen a side-of-the-interstate sign for a coffee place at the next exit, so I pull off the highway to grab a cup. I find a little shop inside a trailer in the parking lot of a gas station in a town called Spearfish. I wait my turn in line and place my order. As it turns out, the coffee isn’t great, but the latte I order has four shots of espresso in it, so I’ve got what I need.

Food is going to have to wait, I decide, so I grab a handful of the Sam’s Club brand nut clusters I have with me in the car. I’m feeling a little nauseous for some reason — maybe because I’ve taken my supplements on an empty stomach today — and the food helps a little with settling things down.

Not far into Wyoming, I start getting the strange urge to sculpt some mashed potatoes.

“This means something,” I suddenly exclaim to no one in particular, not knowing why.

I kid.

I see a sign for Devil’s Tower National Monument — a place I’d forgotten wanting to visit — so I fire up a weird UFO podcast and take the exit, knowing this means I probably won’t be seeing the Tetons until at least tomorrow.

But spontaneity is the spice of road trips. And this destination, though not part of my original plan, is one I’m really excited about. And it just so happens to be right along the way.

A few months ago, I re-watched Steven Spielberg’s classic UFO flick, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The climactic scene of the film takes place at the site of Devil’s Tower, and honestly, that’s the main reason I even know it exists. I hadn’t seen the movie in many years, and I was surprised when I looked it up to find out it came out a month after I was born — December of 1977. I had no idea it was that old.

Highway 14, picked up out of Sundance, is a long and winding two-lane road into the Black Hills Prairie. Before long, my cell signal downgrades from 5G to LTE to SOS to nothing at all, and I lose connection to my podcast stream right as it’s getting interesting, so I drive in silence instead.

16 miles out from the tower, I make my way around a bend and then, suddenly, I see it, a huge lump of striated stone standing colossal and singular above the otherwise gently rolling landscape. I pull over and take out my drone. The federal government has banned drone flights within national parks and monuments, but I’m determined to get what footage I can from outside the legal boundaries.

I drive further in, taking what photos and videos I can along the way. The wind is gusting like crazy today, though, and my little DJI Mini 3 Pro, which weighs all of 249 grams soaking wet, and is about the size of an iPhone, is totally outmatched.

The shots it does get are pretty spectacular:

A roadside plaque, chained to its posts to keep it from flying away in the wind, explains the history of the landmark. It reads:

Although Devils Tower has long been a prominent landmark in northeastern Wyoming, the origin of the mammoth rock obelisk remains somewhat obscure. Geologists agree that Devils Tower consists of molten rock forced upwards from deep within the earth. Debate continues, however, as to whether Devils Tower is solidified lava from the neck of an ancient volcano, the walls of which eroded long ago, or whether it is a sheet of molten rock which was injected between rock layers. The characteristic furrowed columns are apparently the result of uniformly-arranged cracks which appeared during the cooling of the magma. Geologic estimates have placed the age of Devils Tower at greater than fifty million years, although it is likely that erosion uncovered the rock formation only one or two million years ago.

The unique geological attributes of Devils Tower stimulated several early preservation efforts. In 1892 Wyoming Senator Francis E. Warren persuaded the General Land Office to create the land reserve which surrounded the Tower. Senator Warren also launched an unsuccessful effort to declare the entire area a national park. In 1906 Congress passed the Antiquities Act, which empowered the President to bestow national monument status upon selected lands that contain historic landmarks, historic or prehistoric structures, and other significant historic or scientific objects. President Theodore Roosevelt quickly invoked the Antiquities Act, designating Devils Tower the nation’s first national monument in 1906. The National Park Service was created in 1916 and eventually assumed administrative control of all national monuments.

Every time I stop the car, this weird thing happens: I get mobbed by bees and what looks like some kind of stinkbug that is slightly larger and more elongated than the ones I’m used to. For some reason, they are uniquely attracted to my car more than any of the others near me. I’m puzzled by this, but I’m no insect psychologist, so I just treat it like the nuisance it is. A wasp lands on my shoe, and I notice right before it gets to the exposed skin of my ankle and kick it away.

Last summer, when we first moved to Raleigh, I was driving the Uhaul truck we’d rented back to the return station when a wasp landed on my arm through the open window and stung me. I almost crashed the damn truck. I hate these nasty little buggers.

I make it to the small town at the base of the monument and see a post office, located in a tiny red-painted wooden building, where I stop in to mail a postcard to my family I’ve been holding onto since Wall Drug. I speak briefly to the female postal worker, and I ask her about the bugs. She tells me they’re called Boxelder bugs, and says they’re unusually bad this year, likely because of the unseasonably warm autumn.

Then I head off towards the park. Like all the other national parks and monuments I’m seeing, the entrance gate is unmanned due to the government shutdown. It also means I don’t have to pay to get in, and although I would have been happy to buy a parks pass to support these national treasures, I’ll take the free visit.

I drive the winding road up the hill to the base of the tower, and find an open parking spot. It’s a gorgeous day, with mostly clear skies and temperatures in the 60s, and so, unsurprisingly, there are quite a few other folks here today. When I get out, my initial thought is to just snap a couple of photos and get back on the road. Maybe I can make it to the Tetons after all.

But then I make my way through the trees and really get a good look at the tower. And it absolutely captivates me.

If you’ve ever been to the Grand Canyon, you’ll understand what I mean when I say photos can’t do it justice. There’s something so unfathomable about this 1,267 foot tall, totally surreal protrusion, I don’t know how to adequately describe it. I keep taking photos, trying to get the right angle to capture the uncapturable. Before I consciously commit to it, I’m on a multi-mile hike on the trail around its base, trying to grab photos of the object from all sides. Every time I look up at it, the damn thing just feels so improbable.

At one point, I look up, and see something I am absolutely not expecting.

“Holy shit,” I exclaim, to anyone nearby on the trail who might be listening. “Someone is climbing it!”

To give you an idea of where they were, here’s a zoomed-out photo:

I guess, in some glad-it’s-you-and-not-me kind of way, I respect anyone who would be crazy enough to rappel down the face of this absolute unit of volcanic extrusion. But just the thought of doing it myself fills me with nope-induced vertigo.

As I make my way around, I get into a kind of rhythm. This is exactly the kind of thing I have come out West to see, and after a morning spent feeling under the weather, I am suddenly alive. It feels good to be moving, even if the high elevation — nearly a mile above sea level — is making my breathing a little more labored than it otherwise would be for the effort.

I see an gray-haired woman in a bright yellow shirt stopping to take photos, and I say with an “I’m just trying to be friendly” laugh, “No matter how many times you try to capture it, you just can’t.”

She looks at me strangely, but otherwise offers no reaction, then turns and keeps on walking. It isn’t until a few minutes later, when she catches up to a bearded man I assume is her husband and starts speaking in what sounds like Russian, that I come to understand why she didn’t respond. I don’t know a single word of her language, so there’s not much I can do to clear things up, so I let our awkward little interaction hang there in the silence as we stand a few feet away from each other, clicking away on our phone cameras in the hopes of sharing our experience with the folks back home.

The trail around the base of the tower is paved, and fairly easy going. It winds through a forest of ponderosa pines, many of which have fallen or otherwise been burned in what must have been a significant forest fire. The trees are festooned with scarves and hair ties and various other forms of ornamentation, which I don’t understand until I come across an explanatory plaque along the trail. It reads:

Prayers in the Wind

Devils Tower National Monument, known to many as Bear Lodge, is a sacred place for over 20 American Indian tribes. Along the trail, tree branches sway with the power of their prayer bundles. The meaning of each is a mystery—known only to the hands that tie the cloth. With each knot tightened, prayers release into the wind. Keeping your distance and not disturbing the bundles helps protect the prayers. This also means no pictures, please. Instead, leave your camera off and take a deep breath. Think about someone you love.

“A personal power is hanging there on the tree.
Out of respect of another person’s offering,
we back away…if you disrupt [the bundle],
then you create a negative reaction for that
person from a spiritual aspect.”

— Nathaniel Barney, Shoshone

I take pictures anyway, because I’m a philistine.

A thought pops into my head, fully formed, as my make my way around the final stretch of the trail:

Nature is a church.

The thought comes, unbidden, and it encapsulates the sense of wonder and transcendence that I have been feeling as I gaze upon this incredible, improbable feat of nature from every available angle.

And frankly, if that’s true — if my theory about arbitrary sacred places is more or less correct — then Devils Tower is a cathedral.

I can’t explain it, but I’ve been feeling closer to some awareness of the presence of God on this trip than I have in years. I’ve been stripped down to my core by this point, everything in my life that matters having been flayed from me like poor Saint Bartholomew’s skin. Ever since leaving Illinois, I’ve spent about 23 out of every 24 hours of each day with nothing but my own company. My interactions with other human beings have been perfunctory and impersonal, when they happen at all. And with nobody to talk to other than me, it’s gotten a bit easier to reach out to him. I don’t hear anything back with the clarity and direction I’ve been aching for, but like the homily I heard and the bookmark I found on the ground in Chicago, I am cautiously open to the idea that I’m being given little, targeted messages that might be more than mere coincidences.

I realize I have a rosary in my pocket, and I feel compelled to pull it out and pray. As I have every other time I’ve prayed on this trip, my intention is simple: for my wife, my children, my family, and my own direction. For whatever is supposed to happen to happen.

I try to snap an Instagram-worthy photo of my neat little gunmetal combat rosary, which has sat unused for most of the past half decade, but it swings too much from my motion, and most of the shots come out blurry. A man asks me to take his photo in front of the tower, and only then does it occur to me to take a selfie of my own, my colossal head very nearly dwarfing the mountainous rock behind it.

In the last few hundred yards of trail, my feet are hot and sweaty and starting to get sore from rubbing against the rough lining of the old, beat up sneakers I’m wearing. I decide to take them off. I want to be grounded, energetically connected to this place before I leave. I step off the paved trail onto the thick carpet of pine needles, feeling the cool, soothing ground beneath my naked feet.

New people are arriving as I make my way back to the parking lot, and I receive a few sidelong looks. I guess these folks have never seen a barefoot sasquatch in the wild before, his size 14 shoes dangling from his hand. I want to tell a family that’s deliberating over what to do to bite the bullet and take the trail all the way around, but something tells me it’s not my place. They need to choose their own adventure.

I use my shoe to knock a half dozen box elder bugs off the driver’s side door of my car and quickly climb in, hoping none follow me inside.

This is by far the best detour I’ve taken since leaving home, and I’m so glad I’ve done it. I make my way back down the hill and out the unmanned gate, and decide to stop at the gift shop at the bottom. A young man, probably no older than 17 or 18, stands nervously behind the counter. I greet him as I walk in, and begin sifting through piles of cleverly-branded kitsch.

“What’s Area 18?” I ask him, after seeing a dozen alien-branded items with the label.

He mumbles something about the Close Encounters movie.

“But is it a real place,” I ask him, “or is it just a marketing gimmick to sell merch?”

He grins sheepishly.

“It’s just to sell merch,” he concedes.

I buy a Devil’s Tower sticker to put on my laptop, which I’ve decided to turn into a kind of steamer chest, and head out.

I decide to try to get one last drone shot from the parking lot of the gift shop, since I’m technically outside the park grounds. The wind has finally died down some, and I’m able to launch without a hitch.

There’s a popular conspiracy theory that the tower is in fact the stump of an ancient, colossal, petrified tree. It’s not hard to see how people could think such a thing, even though it isn’t true.

Satisfied at last that I’ve squeezed every last drop I can from this experience, I decide to get back on the road to points West. It’s going to be a long day of driving, the sun is already dipping towards the horizon, and I haven’t eaten an actual meal yet. But I’m excited and happy from the experience as I head out on the road.

I’ve got hundreds of miles to go before I sleep, and as it will turn out, the evening has some surprises still in store.

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