A Day at Devils Tower
Pouring a mug of boiled coffee, I wait for the sun to make its appearance. The cup steams in the damp, cool morning air. Shivering, I press both hands to the heat the thick porcelain holds.
The sky begins to purple, and stars dim perceptibly. Through the campground cottonwoods, the immense, shadow-black bulk of the Tower materializes against the sky. It is possible now to discern the flight of bats overhead. But, in an instant, their swirling, night-long ballet vanishes with the darkness.
From my campsite along the Belle Fourche—this narrow, meandering river the French fur trappers named “the beautiful branch”—I listen to the first sounds of the day. Across the river a great horned owl protests the morning’s swift advance. Coming through the veil of river fog, its haunting, pervasive hoo-hoo-hoooo is enough to freeze the blood of cottontails.
Even before the first hint of light, robins had begun to sing softly. In these unhurried morning songs they prove themselves thrushes. With the increasing light, the growing blend of wren, vireo, and thrasher music intensifies. These soft phrasings soon quicken into proclamations of territory, and meadowlarks, mourning doves, and yellowthroats compete across thicket, river, and meadow, their singing seemingly sharpened for distance and authority.
Nearby, a cottontail grazes on the dew-bent grass. It pauses occasionally, pointing its ears and working its nostrils in my direction. Three whitetail deer continue their cautious single-file approach, heading from the river bottom toward the higher ground of the prairie dog town. Crossing the campground, they repeatedly stop to inspect their surroundings. A log snaps and whistles in my fire, bringing their heads about in immediate, almost mechanical unison. Deliberately the lead animal lifts its tail to expose its white, silent signal of danger, and all three step smartly away as if in time to a fast metronome.
Direct sunlight spotlights the Tower. As though to challenge the sudden appearance of a gigantic, equally yellow competitor, a meadowlark takes wing, singing its loud, clear claim over the prairie dog town. Dawn is announced, the day begun.
The level rays of the sun accentuate the Tower’s vertical polygonal columns. The stark contrast of light and shadow imparted by the graceful taperings of the soaring, many-sided columns give the Tower a man-made look. In this light it resembles the ruin of a stupendous ancient temple, not the casual result of some remote geological event.
Sipping the strong coffee, I wonder at the long procession of vanished Indian societies that camped and hunted here periodically through the centuries. These ancient peoples devised various stories to explain such an unusual landmark. And yet what science now says about the creation of Devils Tower would have seemed to those tribes as fantastic as their legends of a gargantuan bear gouging the rock seem to us today. Minor uncertainties remain, but geologists have pieced together a rough picture of the Tower’s probable origin. Some 60 million years ago, great Earth stresses began to deform the crust of the continent, resulting in the uplifting of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains region. As the surface rock layers began to crumple and fault, magma from deep inside the Earth welled up into many of the resulting gaps and fissures. In many places on the continent, spectacular volcanoes formed, erupting with explosive force.
As the Rockies were being created, the climate of the continent’s interior began to change. The long reign of the dinosaurs that had presided over a stable, tropical landscape was coming to an end. The climate was gradually becoming cooler and drier. Doubtless the immense volumes of volcanic ash ejected into the atmosphere prevented a percentage of solar heat from reaching the Earth. Certainly the rise of the Rocky Mountains to the west influenced the old weather patterns. As the mountain blocks rose higher, they intercepted the warm, moist winds that blew inland from the Pacific. With the air masses rising ever higher, more and more of the moisture that had watered the extensive inland Cretaceous forests and swamplands was prevented from reaching what we know today as the Great Plains.