A huge basalt pillar right in the middle of the plain with the ominous name of Devil's Tower has attracted climbers from all over the world to Wyoming for over a century. But at a height of only 386 meters, not many daredevils obeyed. How can one not believe in mysticism?
At the first glance at this mountain towering right in the middle of the Great Plains, associations come to mind with some utterly hypertrophied stump or a tower erected by some crazy architect.
The impeccably regular shape and incredible size make this rock formation almost the main attraction of the poor state of Wyoming. It is no coincidence that a National Park was created in the area around the Devil's Tower in 1906, and the peak itself acquired the status of a National Monument.
The Indians called this mountain Mata Tipila, which means "House of the Bear". Until now, a time-worn legend about seven girls who was attacked by a bear during a carefree walk through the forest walks through the collections of mythology. Desperate to run away from the angry beast, the girls climbed a stone and began to pray for salvation from above. As a result, the stone grew up to the sky, and the girls descended from it directly to the heavenly plateau and became the stars of the Pleiades.
No matter how hard the bear tried to climb the mountain, it failed, and the longitudinal marks from its claws remaining on the surface of the stone are direct evidence of its ethereal attempts to taste innocent childish flesh. Looking at this wonderful rock, you involuntarily agree with the train of thought of the indigenous people: something very big, evil and otherworldly lives here indeed.
The origin of this unique object is shrouded in mystery and a thick layer of dust. Scientists say that the Devil's Tower is nothing more than the remnants of an impressive mountain range, which suffered a crushing defeat in the battle with time and adverse weather events. Two hundred million years ago, the Great Plain was all covered by the sea. Magma that penetrated into the seabed from the seething bowels of the earth became the impetus for the formation of a columnar basalt body.
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With the passage of time, the sea that operated here descended, exposing the basalt formations that had once appeared at the very bottom, and merciless to all living and even inanimate time, taking erosion as its allies, destroyed even basalt. This version is supported by fragments of rocks scattered here and there along the entire foot of the majestic tower. The pieces fell away, but the very base, which is a gigantic stone pillar, still amazes the imagination of tourists from all over the world.
There is another, much less believable, but captivating version of the origin of the Devil's Tower with a mystical halo. The correct shape of the rock suggests that someone did a good job on it besides nature, and since people in those days were not able to erect such "building" objects, the thought of the intervention of higher forces takes place in human consciousness … It is clear that God has nothing to do with it - the object is too dark and sinister to be the fruit of divine intervention. But the Devil …
The Indians who lived nearby, it was the Devil who considered the master of this amazing mountain. The consciousness of the aborigines settled him at the very top and endowed him with the ability to cause thunder and lightning, mercilessly striking people with fiery arrows. It is likely that over the course of several centuries, lightning claimed many human lives, and the Indians generously shared their knowledge with the first white settlers. Actually, the latter should be attributed to the authorship of the modern name of the mountain - Devil`s Tower.
Moving away from primitive beliefs in some kind of omnipotent Devil who found shelter at the top of a majestic mountain, the consciousness of people began to look for the nature of mysterious light anomalies that regularly reveal themselves at the top, in the plane of contact with an alien civilization and to consider the top as a landing site for flying objects from other planets. This curious version became widespread after Steven Spielberg's wonderful film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", in which a UFO lands just on that very peak.
Numerous rumors about the unclean origin of the mountain peak do not scare away ambitious climbers in whose dreams the conquest of Devil's Tower takes about the same place as the Royal Flush in the hands of a poker player. The height of the Tower is 386 meters - this is higher than the famous Empire State Building in New York, but by mountaineering standards, there is nothing extraordinary in these figures. Much more significant heights were also conquered.
The difficulty in the case of the Devil's Tower is generated by its sheer walls: climbing to the top is not just difficult, but incredibly difficult, and even more difficult to return back, since the descent is a much more serious danger than the ascent. Plus, the danger of boulders falling from great heights is still relevant.
Each attempt to conquer an impregnable peak is fraught with a huge risk to life. The pioneer was one of the local residents, but it happened in the distant 19th century, and there is absolutely no way to confirm this information now.
Almost a century later, in 1938, this feat was repeated by Jack Durrance. The third conqueror of the sinister Tower was George Hopkins, but unlike his predecessors, he conquered it from the air. An experienced parachutist desired worldwide fame, but found himself hostage to the devil's peak: he successfully landed on the mountain, but the euphoria of success was soon replaced by a complete lack of constructive solutions to the problem of descent to earth.
The very same Durrance came to the rescue, leading a climbing expedition to rescue an ambitious parachutist. After the long-awaited descent to the ground, Hopkins, languishing on the mountain for a week, told the whole world about the whole hordes of huge rats that settled at the very top. If life is not there, then the question of what these insatiable creatures can eat remains open.
Years pass, and the rock still rises majestically over the Great Plain, maintaining such an attractive mystical halo around it. From time to time, mysterious lights are observed in the sky above it, eyewitness accounts of unidentified flying objects are recorded, researchers speculate about the mysterious purpose of the Tower, assigning it the role of almost a new Noah's ark in the coming apocalypse or a corridor to another, yet unknown to us dimension. A lot of questions, the answers to which are known only to God. Or is it the Devil?