Why It's Worth the Stop

There is nothing subtle about your first glimpse of Devils Tower. Rising 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River, the enormous formation seems almost too unusual to be natural. Its striking vertical columns have inspired stories and speculation for generations, including a popular modern claim that the Tower is the stump of an impossibly huge petrified tree. That’s a fun theory to ponder while standing beneath it, but geologists identify Devils Tower as an igneous rock formation shaped by erosion. The Tower also holds deep cultural and spiritual significance for multiple Indigenous peoples whose connections to this landscape stretch back long before it became America’s first national monument in 1906.

Movie fans may recognize it immediately as the mysterious destination in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which transformed Devils Tower into a pop-culture icon. You don’t need to hike the entire Tower Trail to appreciate its scale, but walking even part of the paved path provides changing perspectives of the massive columns and surrounding boulder field. Whether you come for the geology, Indigenous history, movie connection, or simply to stare up and wonder how on earth that thing got there, Devils Tower is one of those places that’s even stranger and more impressive in person.