Close Encounter With A Big Rock

Today we took a little day trip to Devil's Tower in Wyoming. It's barely 2 hours away, so we drove over after the children's morning preschool time. (Mikel is taking unused vacation days this week.)

What an awesome, curious site, this enormous tree-stump shaped rock shooting out of the ground. There are some interesting Native American folklore stories about how it came to be, including one about little girls being chased by a bear who were taken up to safety by this tower that rose out of the ground, with the bear's claws causing the top-to-bottom vertical cuts as he couldn't hold on.

At any rate, now I want to rent Steven Speilberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, since I haven't seen it since I was a kid.

A number of climbers were scaling the tower. We walked around and took some photos, then ate the lunch we'd packed. We had the dog with us, so we weren't allowed to walk on the trails around the perimeter of the tower.

Mondays in September are a good time to go! Some tourists but not too crowded.

Here's a little trivia for you. Devil's Tower was named America's first national monument, in 1906.