Sunday, July 22, 2018

A Visit to Devil's Tower

On our bus tour last month, we stopped at Devil's Tower in Wyoming.  Devil's Tower is probably most famous today for being featured in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."  Devil's Tower is where the space aliens meet the US military and a bunch of scientists in a great intergalactic powwow.

In the movie, the chief character, played by Richard Dreyfus, and a lady companion, scale the sides of Devil's Tower to get to the top, where they witness the historic meeting with beings from another planet.  The scaling part was pretty bogus, because the sides of the Tower are very steep, and are only rarely scaled by experienced mountain climbers.

Devil's Tower was formed by volcanic activity millions of years ago.  This type of lava formation looks like giant strings of magma, and that's what it is.  It is known as columnar basalt.

I took the photo at the left.

Note:  Devil's Tower was the first declared National Monument of the United States, dedicated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.


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