Devils Tower

America's first National Monument, and sacred ground to Plains nations centuries before that designation, Devils Tower's improbable columned silhouette has drawn climbers, ceremonies, and — thanks to Hollywood — UFO seekers.

Long before it had a federal designation, the striking rock formation rising from the plains of northeastern Wyoming held deep significance for the region's Native nations. At least twenty Plains tribes, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Kiowa, know it as 'Bear's Lodge' (Mato Tipila in Lakota), and hold oral traditions explaining its distinctive vertical columns, many involving a giant bear clawing at the rock while pursuing people who had climbed to escape it.

Geologists believe the tower is the exposed core of an igneous intrusion that pushed up through sedimentary rock roughly 40 to 50 million years ago; the softer surrounding rock has since eroded away, leaving the tower's columns standing 867 feet above their base. In 1893, local ranchers William Rogers and Willard Ripley made the first recorded ascent using a wooden stake ladder driven into a crack in the rock, remnants of which are still visible today.

On September 24, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt designated Devils Tower the first U.S. National Monument under the newly passed Antiquities Act. The site later gained a different kind of fame as the setting for Steven Spielberg's 1977 film 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' drawing new visitors to a landmark still used for climbing and, each June, for Native American ceremonies the National Park Service asks climbers to respect with a voluntary closure.