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by Ancient Code Team
April 25,
2018
from
Ancient-Code Website
Spanish version
Devil's Tower, Wyoming
The enigmatic natural wonder happens to be
the first declared United States National Monument,
established on September 24, 1906,
by President Theodore Roosevelt.
It's the first declared
National Monument of the United States, and it is shrouded in myths,
legends, and mysteries.
The so-called
Devil's Tower is a monolithic igneous structure or
volcanic neck located in the Black Hills, near Hulett and Sundance
in the county of Crook, northeast of Wyoming, on the Belle Fourche
River.
It rises dramatically
386 m above the surrounding terrain, and its summit is located
1,558 m above sea level.
The breathtaking landscape surrounding the Devil's Tower
consists mainly of sedimentary rocks.
The oldest rocks visible at the National Monument were located
in a shallow sea during the Middle or Late Triassic period, 225
to 195 million years ago.
The first known ascent to
the Devil's Tower was made in 1893 by William Rogers and
Willard Ripley.
They found a narrow
vertical crack that opened in the wall from the ground to the
top.
They used wooden
planks to build a staircase.
The staircase could be used until 1927, and even today you can
see remains of it.
Devil's Tower,
Wyoming
The Devil's Tower and
the Pleiades
According to the legends of the native American tribes of the Kiowa
and Sioux Lakhota,
in the distant past,
young girls went out to play and were seen by giant bears, who
began to chase them.
In an effort to escape the bears, the girls climbed on top of a
rock, got on their knees and prayed to the Great Spirit to save
them.
Upon hearing their prayers, the Great Spirit made the rock grow
from the Earth towards heaven so that the bears could not reach
the girls.
The bears, in their attempt to climb the rock, which had become
too steep to climb, left deep claw marks on the sides.
When the girls reached heaven, they became the
constellation of the Pleiades.
However, there are other
stories and legends about the mysterious rock formation.
A Sioux legend tells that,
two Sioux boys
wandered off far away from their village when another mighty
bear, with claws the site of
tipi poles started chasing them,
wanting to eat them for breakfast.
As the bear approached the boys, and as he was just about the
grab them, they prayed to Wakan Tanka - "the sacred" or "the
divine," the Great Spirit - to save them from the bear.
They climbed a rock while the bear was desperately trying to
climb on the rock as well and grab the two boys.
However, the bear didn't manage to climb the rock and left huge
marks on its side.
Mato - as the bear was called - eventually gave up and came to
rest in a place now known as Bear Butte.
Wanblee, an eagle, rescued the boys and helped them get off the
massive rock, returning them to their village.
In modern times, the
Devil's tower was used in the 1977 movie 'Close
Encounters of the Third Kind.'
Close Encounters of The Third Kind
Strangely, just as in many other places in the vicinity, tourists
and locals have reported strange lights in the sky just above the
enigmatic rock formation.
Some even claim that these lights even come to rest on the summit of
the massive rock.
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