Devil’s Tower National Monument, Wyoming - June 23rd to 25th, 2021
Devils Tower National Monument is one of those places you need to see in person to really appreciate its scale and significance. It looks out of place from the surrounding landscape. Many native tribes, the Arapahoe, the Cheyenne, the Crow, the Shoshone, the Kiowa, and the Lakota, consider Devils Tower sacred. It is easy to understand why. Devils Tower’s presence is powerful.
We arrived at Devils Tower at about noon. There was a 20 to 25 minute wait to get through the entrance station. A sign on the entrance station said the Belle Fourche River Campground was full. We decided to drive through the campground anyway. Signs indicated that Loop A was closed starting on Thursday for some reason. However, there were plenty of sites to choose from in Loop B. It’s a good thing we ignored the sign at the entrance station.
After eating our lunch at our camp site, we relaxed for about an hour or two for the temperatures to start to cool down a bit. It was in the 90’s, close to 100 degrees, and sunny. The forecast for Thursday was cloudy with a chance of rain and cooler temperatures. So we decided to go for a hike on Wednesday in the sunshine despite the heat. We started from our camp site at about 2:30 pm, picking up Red Beds Trail to climb up to the Visitor Center near the Tower.
The north and west side of the Tower Trail loop was closed for a repaving project. We walked the half that was open, returning back to the Visitor Center the way we came. Prayer bundles and prayer cloths left by native Americans adorned many of the trees surrounding Devils Tower. There were only a couple of people rock climbing Devils Tower. The National Park Service asks climbers to voluntarily refrain from climbing the Tower in June out of respect for the native peoples.
On the southeast side of the tower, the remains of the Rogers and Ripley Stake Ladder can be seen in one of the cracks of the tower. Right Buddy (RB) could see it using the 65x zoom of her camera. Left Buddy (LB) had a hard time seeing it with his naked eye. Take a pair of binoculars with you to get a better look. The ladder was built in 1893 and last climbed in 1927.
Then we refilled our water bottles and continued on the Red Beds Trail. The Red Beds is a loop around the Tower, but much larger than the Tower Trail, three miles long instead of 1.3 miles. As the Red Beds Trail approached the road on the southeast side of the loop, we detoured down the road to the park entrance station and the Trading Post. You guessed it. It was time for ice cream. RB had huckleberry and mint chip. LB had vanilla and butter pecan. From the Trading Post, it was a short walk back to our camp site, less than a mile.
The whole hike was 6.7 miles with a 761 foot elevation gain that we completed in three and a half hours. We counted it as hike #21 of our 52 Hike Challenge.
The wind picked up in the evening which helped cool things down, but it brought some light rain along with it. We spent the evening at our camp site, staring up at Devils Tower, which we could see from our site.
Thursday was a relaxing day. We hung out at our camp site, catching up on work. After lunch, we drove over to the KOA store just outside the park entrance for ice cream. The day before, we had ice cream at the Trading Post across the street, so we wanted to compare the two. The ice cream was pretty similar. KOA was slightly better in our opinion because they had milkshakes and did not put those silly wrappers on the waffle cones. RB has crushed a cone trying to peel a wrapper off. LB likes his vanilla shakes thick, but KOA’s milkshake was so thick, it was more like soft serve ice cream. It still tasted good, though.
We considered riding our bikes from the campground to the store for ice cream, but it was threatening rain. Besides, our batteries needed charging since our van was in the shade and it was cloudy. Driving the one mile to the park entrance was not enough to provide much of a charge, so we idled the engine a few times while we were parked by the stores in the afternoon.
The rest of the afternoon, we hung out near the park entrance by the stores for the better cell signal. We were expecting the line into the park would die down around 2 pm, but it was still a 20 to 30 minute line at 4 pm. We needed to idle our engine anyway to charge the batteries, so we got in line at 4 pm. For dinner, we had fried egg sandwiches which we could cook on the butane stove and not use our battery power.
We discovered why Loop A in the campground was closed. It was reserved for the participants in the Sacred Hoop 500 Mile Run. Lakota youth run a relay of 500 miles in five days through significant sites in Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana. Devils Tower is one of those historic, significant places for the Lakota. One of the support staff walked over to our site to ask us questions about our van. He is a nurse, from a tribe in California. We had a lovely conversation with him about the van and about the Sacred Hoop Run.
Later in the evening, we had another wonderful conversation with a couple from Florida. Campgrounds are such a great place to meet nice, friendly people.
There isn’t much else to see at Devils Tower other than the tower itself. However, we’re glad we spent two nights there. It felt like we had the opportunity to get to know the tower better and meet people who have a deep connection with the tower. As a result, Devils Tower has more meaning to us.
Check out our related video: Devil’s Tower National Monument, Wyoming
(RB)