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Devils Tower
America's first national monument, a butte in Wyoming
Devils Tower is a dramatic, flat-topped butte of fluted igneous rock rising abruptly some 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River in northeastern Wyoming. Formed when molten rock cooled underground and was later exposed by erosion, its near-vertical columns make it one of the most striking landforms in the country. In 1906 it became the very first national monument in the United States, proclaimed by Theodore Roosevelt.
Sacred to more than twenty Northern Plains tribes, who know it by names such as Bear Lodge and tie it to creation stories, the tower remains an active place of ceremony as well as a magnet for rock climbers. It reached worldwide fame as the otherworldly destination in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and its silhouette above the surrounding pine forest and grassland is among the most recognizable in the American West.