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Close Encounters at Devils Tower After visiting the site where my parents met, I stopped at a Burger King in Dickinson late that afternoon and ate a Whopper and fries for dinner, while deciding which way to proceed: south to Colorado or west straight home to Washington. I decided on Colorado, so I drove south on a two-lane highway for a few hours and pulled into the small town of Bowman, North Dakota around 9 p.m. This being hunting season, the motels in Bowman were jammed and the only room available was cloaked in a heavy fog of cigarette smoke. Not wanting to pay $40 for a motel room and the privilege of smelling like a pack of Marlboros for the next three days, I decided to instead sleep in my pickup truck next door in a church parking lot.
Always having a place to sleep is one reason why I like pickup trucks. I used to sleep in parking lots quite a bit during my younger (and poorer) traveling days, but this was the first and only time that I'd done so on this trip. There's no shower in the morning but hey, it's a cheap way to travel.
Early the next morning, I headed into South Dakota and drove by the geographic center of the United States, which is just off Highway 83. In the late morning I reached one of my favorite places in America, Devil's Tower National Monument in northeastern Wyoming. Even if you haven't been to Devils Tower, you'd probably recognize it if you've seen the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," since it was the source of Richard Dreyfuss' obsession in that film.
I'd been to Devils Tower twice before, both times during the late spring, and always had a great time. Indeed, it's one of my very favorite national parks in the U.S. This time was different, though: the skies were gray, the air was crisp, the campground was closed, the leaves had fallen, and the park was nearly deserted. It was kind of depressing, actually. As I hiked around the base of Devils Tower, I changed my mind and decided to just head straight back to Bellingham instead of going to Colorado. I missed the Northwest too much and just wanted to get home.
Above left: Belle Fourche (pronounced "Bell Foosh"), South Dakota, is located a few miles south of the geographic center of the United States. Above right: Back in the late 1800s, a guy named Harry Longabaugh spent several months in the Sundance, Wyoming jail for rustling cattle. Ever afterwards, he was known as the "Sundance Kid."
Above left: According to Indian legend, the sides of Devils Tower were scraped by a giant grizzly bear who was trying to climb it. Geologists, on the other hand, claim it's a geologic formation known as "columnar basalt." I prefer the Indian version. Above center: Each year, along with grizzly bears, hundreds of mountain climbers try to climb Devils Tower. Can you see the climbers making their way to the top? Above right: Over two billion prairie dogs lived on the Great Plains in 1800. The habitat has since shrunk to a few small pockets, including here at Devils Tower. Cute critters, eh?
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