The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)

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The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)


	Prayer cloths at the base of Bear Lodge. (Keith Carter)

WATCHING CLIMBERS INCH UP the walls of Devils Tower, in northeastern Wyoming, is a chief entertainment for tourists, half a million of whom come every year, inspired in large part by the alien shenanigans that take place here in the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. After taking my turn staring through a Park Service telescope, noting how tiny were the rock jocks and how massive was the rock, I fell in behind a family in matching blue shorts and white kneesocks who decided to walk around the tower on the 1.3-mile asphalt pathway built around its base. There were prayer cloths tied to trees and, in a gesture by the Park Service toward multiculturalism, signs advising visitors that this was holy ground to native people, so show some respect. There were also signs that explained the tools and techniques of crack climbing.



	Sweat lodge frames in Ulm Pishkun State Park. (Keith Carter)

The tower, proclaimed a national monument in 1906, is the setting for a common legend. According to the Kiowa Indians, a bear chased seven sisters, who clambered onto a tree stump. The stump surged heavenward, transporting the girls to safety as the bear clawed deep gouges in the bark of the rising monolith. The sisters were transported by the Creator into the sky and resurrected as the seven stars of the Pleiades.

Geologists figure that some 60 million years ago, a molten surge of rock thrust through sedimentary layers that had been laid down in a vanished ocean, and cooled before it reached the surface. As the magma turned to igneous rock it fractured, creating a tight subterranean bundle of six-sided columns. Over the eons the elements and the Belle Fourche River ate away the softer rocks, leaving a singular colossus with nearly vertical walls rising 867 feet from the rolling grassland.

In the tourist traffic it was hard for me to get an undisturbed sense of the place, so I headed off toward the 1.5-mile Joyner Ridge Trail, a path less traveled, where I could look at the tower from a distance. Watching as its shape and color changed in the passing afternoon sun, I recalled the time I had come here as a kid, piled into the backseat of my old man's Ford with my sister, on our way to Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, Glacier. We traveled at a furious clip, along a route I had come to think of as Ashtray Alley because the only thing I cared about was the opportunity to augment my collection of tawdry knickknacks printed with primitive renditions of the sights we were supposed to be experiencing.

Of course, I had no idea then of the controversies surrounding the tower. Even the name is disputed. The first maps of the area called it Bear Lodge, a translation of the Lakota name Mato Tipila. But an Army colonel named Richard Dodge changed the name in 1875, when he escorted a team of scientists and surveyors into the area, in violation of U.S. treaties, after George Armstrong Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills. The Lakota Sioux, who ruled this region, despise the name, in part because of its link to the darker forces of Christianity.

Today, Devils Tower is regarded by the climbing community as one of the premier crack-climbing challenges in North America. Although climbers agreed in 1995 to stay off Mato Tipila throughout June, the month of the summer solstice and of the traditional sun dances here, the sport remains a hotly contested topic. The bolts hammered into the stone, the attempt to subdue the natural world, the yelling between climbers, plus all that pissing on the rock—these things are a sacrilege, argue the natives, some of whom wonder why it's a federal offense to climb the faces of those dead white men carved into Mount Rushmore. As Lakota writer Vine Deloria Jr. said in the 2001 public-television documentary "In the Light of Reverence," "It's not like we designated a place and said, ÔThis is going to be sacred.' It came out of a lot of experience. The idea is not to pretend to own it, not to exploit it, but to respect it." For this reason, there are mixed feelings among natives about the sculpture of Crazy Horse being carved 17 miles southeast of Rushmore on Thunderhead Mountain. Although this stonework, chiseled by an Anglo artist at the request of the Lakota, celebrates the great Sioux warrior and is a reminder that the Lakota were never defeated by the United States in battle, it's taking shape through the blasting and drilling of the holy Black Hills.

When the light began to fade and Bear Lodge took on its last color of the day, I realized it had been two hours since I wondered what time it was. On my way back through the visitor center I slipped the watch from my wrist and left it on a bench.

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