Wyoming: Devil's Tower

After our jaunt to Little Big Horn, we motored onward back to Wyoming and spent the night in Gillette, Wyoming.  Frank and Alex took advantage of the motel's pool and went swimming to burn off some Alex's pent up energy from long days in the car.

From Gillette, we took a detour to Devil's Tower, the granite mountain made famous by the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."  I was texting my MOMocrat friend Cynematic about some MOMocrats arrangements for the Democratic National Convention.  She texted me, "Don't go with the alien, no matter how friendly they seem."

We didn't encounter any aliens, just a lot of bikers on the road and in the park.  This month is evidently a big bike rally across the west, and thousands of bikers are roaming around, decending on one small town after another, the most famous rally being in Sturgis, SD.  Famous, or I should say "infamous" since that is the site where John McCain encouraged his wife to enter a topless beauty pageant recently, showing what a great advocate for women he really is.

The bikers themselves were friendly enough, and lined up to listen to the Park Ranger's lecture on the Tower, it's geology and formation, just like the elderly tourists in Winnebagos and families like ours with bored small kids.  One elderly couple pointed out some climbers nearing the top of the tower, and loaned Alex their binoculars to take a look.  The climbers were hard to see, so we had to take their word for it that the white speck at the top was a person.  If you look really, really hard an enlargement of the picture above, you can see a white speck in the middle, which is allegedly a man helping a woman climber finish the 3-4 hour climb.  Or maybe it's really a large bird or a basket of fruit.  It's kind of open to interpretation, in my opinion.

The other feature of Devils Tower National Park is a place called Prairie Dog Town, where hundreds of prairie dogs have a complex city of underground burrows.  It reminded me of the Animal Planet show called "Meerkat Manor" and I imagined that they must have some very complex social systems within the burrows, along with some predator drama and intrigue.  They like to come to the side of the road to beg tourists for food, and despite numerous signs asking, well demanding, that people not feed them, we saw a family feeding them.  Some of them were fairly hefty for wild animals, no doubt from a steady diet of grubs, grass, and granola bars.

They seemed harmless enough, but I am pretty wary of wild animals, even cute ones, so I told Alex he could not under any terms, give the prairie dogs Cheetos.  The last thing we needed was a junk-food crazed  prairie dog biting the hand that fed him.

Alex was disappointed, but he complied.  After a while, I started thinking up names for them, like "Shorty" and "Toasty" and "Chunks".  They seemed fairly comfortable with the silly humans stopping every five minutes to snap their pictures. 

The prairie dogs were not only photogenic, but cooperative in having their picture taken, which is more than I can say for some eight year old boys.

Comments

[Research Mom]

Hi, G.
Love the pictures. I almost feel like I'm vacation. Almost. Hope you are having a great time!

[carol]

That prairie dog looks like he is not happy with the no junk food decision but he sure is cute.

Love the pictures. Not sure I believe the McCain story. I am sure he is too old to remember if having done so, to having done so.

[Glennia]

Carol, the McCain story was widely reported a few weeks ago, just before our trip. It happened in July and there is video of it on YouTube.

[Aimee Greeblemonkey]

I've been there! It's totally wild, eh?

[John Hunter]

Thanks for the post, I have put some photos of my hike at the monument online. http://curiouscat.com/travels/devilstowernm2002.cfm