A Day with the Devil

Devil’s Tower is the first national monument. It’s also Dad’s favorite monument . Personally I don’t understand why, to me it just looks like a tall stone tower, but to each their own. Devil’s Tower (know by the Native Americans as Bear Lodge) is also the tallest thing we have seen on our trip. It is around 860 feet tall from the boulder bed, and more than 1000 from its actual base at the river. Anyone is allowed to go on the boulder field, which surrounds almost the whole tower, but you have to register if you want to climb to the top. We opted instead for a three mile hike around the base of it. We saw many birds and a few very pretty caterpillars, as well as a marmot. We also saw many pieces of wood that tricked us into thinking they were animals.

The tower also has bats, and on the final day we listened to a talk about them. The park ranger there talked quite a bit about white nose syndrome, which is a disease that kills bats, and how they were worried that some of the bats might have caught it. The disease comes from a fungus and it grows on their noses, wings and ears. The reason it is so dangerous is because it is very itchy, and the itchiness causes them to wake up from hibernation during the winter and then starve to death because they don’t have any food. There are 11 different species of bat at the tower, although the ranger could only list nine from memory, which is nine more than I can.

We also watched this really weird movie called “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. The reason we watched it was because it was centered around Devils Tower where we were. It was directed by Steven Spielberg and was an absolute mess. I think the movie is supposed to be about aliens that use music as communication and some guy who gets hypnotized by them. It made absolutely no sense to anyone in the family, and for once I was right when I said a movie that Mom and Dad picked was going to be bad. Even the popcorn wasn’t very good!