**Something About Wyoming's Devils Tower No Longer Makes Sense — Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/wyoming-devils-tower-mystery/ Devils Tower's name and geology are misunderstood; mistranslation and scientific debate obscure its true identity and formation. ## Key Takeaways - Devils Tower's name is the result of a mistranslation that replaced 'bear' with 'devil', obscuring its indigenous significance. - Scientific consensus on the geological origin of Devils Tower remains unresolved due to missing evidence caused by erosion. - Improved dating methods have revised the age of Devils Tower, showing it to be older than previously thought. - Cultural and legal challenges hinder renaming efforts despite recognition of the original indigenous name. - The landmark holds both spiritual significance for Native tribes and iconic status in American culture and geology. ## What the video covers - A mistranslated word from 1875 changed the name of Devils Tower from Bear Lodge, erasing its sacred identity for Native tribes. - The US government has resisted efforts to restore the original name despite support from tribal leaders and federal committees. - Devils Tower was the first US national monument, designated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. - The rock formation has been featured in popular culture, notably in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. - Geologists disagree on the exact formation process of Devils Tower, with theories including volcanic plug, laccolith, stock, and lava coulee. - No conclusive evidence exists due to erosion removing key geological clues, leaving the debate unsettled for over a century. - Age estimates of Devils Tower have shifted from 40.5 million to roughly 49 million years based on improved dating techniques. - The formation's unique columnar structure has cultural interpretations as claw marks from Native American legends. - Legal and bureaucratic obstacles complicate efforts to rename the landmark to reflect its indigenous heritage. - Climbing restrictions and cultural respect efforts coexist amid ongoing tourism and scientific interest. ## Chapters 1. 00:00 The Mistranslation That Changed a Landmark 2. 02:08 Devils Tower in Popular Culture 3. 04:02 Geological Theories and Debates 4. 06:36 New Research and Unsettled Science 5. 08:42 Dating Devils Tower: Age Revisions 6. 11:07 Cultural Significance and Indigenous Perspectives 7. 15:58 Legal and Bureaucratic Barriers to Renaming 8. 25:12 Climbing, Tourism, and Respect for the Site 9. 28:59 Fossil Discoveries and Ancient History Answers ## Questions about this video Why is Devils Tower called 'Devils Tower' if it was originally named Bear Lodge? The name 'Devils Tower' originated from a mistranslation in 1875 where the word for 'bear' was mistakenly translated as 'devil' or 'evil spirit,' erasing the original indigenous name Bear Lodge. What are the main geological theories about how Devils Tower formed? Geologists have proposed several theories including it being a volcanic plug, a laccolith, a stock, or a lava coulee, but no consensus exists because erosion removed key evidence. Has the age of Devils Tower been accurately determined? Age estimates have changed from about 40.5 million years to roughly 49 million years based on more precise argon-argon dating, but some uncertainty remains. ## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker A Buried inside a rushed interpreter's notes from 1875 is a single mistranslated word. For 150 years, it has been erasing the real identity of one of America's most sacred landmarks. And the United States government is still working right now to keep that mistake in place. 00:20 Speaker A You've been told this Wyoming rock earned its ominous name because the first explorers thought it looked demonic. 00:28 Speaker A That's not what happened. A garbled translation swapped the word for bear with the word for evil spirit and turned a mountain more than two dozen tribes call Bear Lodge into Devil's Tower. For the last decade, the US Senate has introduced bill after bill 00:44 Speaker A to make sure nobody fixes it. In 2014, Lakota spiritual leader Chief Arvol Looking Horse asked Washington to formally give the mountain its true name back. 00:56 Speaker A Ten years later, a federal committee agreed with him. The name still hasn't changed. Somewhere in northeastern Wyoming, 867 feet of solid rock is still standing under a name it was never supposed to carry. You've probably seen it without knowing what you were looking 01:12 Speaker A at. A gray-brown fortress of rock fluted from base to summit like the pipes of some impossible organ standing alone against a flat Wyoming horizon with nothing around it to explain why it's there. No mountain range leading up to 01:28 Speaker A it. No chain of similar formations nearby. Just one tower alone, visible for miles in every direction. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt looked at that same silhouette and used a brand new law, the Antiquities Act, to declare it the very 01:44 Speaker A first national monument in the United States. The push to protect it hadn't started with him either. A temporary forest reserve had already set the site aside more than a decade earlier. But a reserve had no teeth. And a Wyoming 01:58 Speaker A senator spent years pushing for something the law could actually enforce. Not the Grand Canyon, not Yellowstone's geysers. This one first. 02:08 Speaker A Seventy years later, Steven Spielberg's production team scouted it for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and built an entire alien mothership sequence around its summit. And the film works so well that campgrounds nearby still project it onto outdoor screens every 02:22 Speaker A summer with the real tower looming behind the movie screen like it's watching its own performance. 02:29 Speaker A Today, more than 400,000 people drive out to see it every year. It has a name, a designation, a place in American mythology as one of the most photographed rock formations on Earth. 02:41 Speaker A And that's exactly the problem because almost nothing about what you just heard is as settled as it sounds. 02:50 Speaker A Start with the rock itself. Every geology textbook will tell you Devil's Tower is an igneous intrusion, a body of magma that pushed up into softer rock and hardened. That much nobody disputes. 03:06 Speaker A But ask a geologist exactly what shape that magma body was or whether it ever reached the surface as a volcano and you'll get four different answers from four different decades of research and none of them fully agree. 03:20 Speaker A This isn't a fringe theory versus mainstream science. This is mainstream geology arguing with itself for more than 100 years in peer-reviewed journals without a resolution. 03:32 Speaker A The first serious theory came from geologist Everett Carpenter in 1888, who called it the neck of an extinct volcano. Its magma conduit hardened after the surrounding cone eroded away. 03:45 Speaker A It's a clean, intuitive story, and it's stuck. Textbooks still repeat some version of it, but there's a hole in it big enough to walk through. If Devil's Tower really is a volcanic plug, there should be evidence of an actual volcano 04:02 Speaker A around it. Ash layers, lava flows, pyroclastic debris. Nobody has found any. The rock around the tower is ordinary Jurassic and Cretaceous sedimentary stone, sandstone and shale and gypsum laid down in ancient seas and flood plains with no trace of the surface 04:23 Speaker A eruption the volcano theory requires. So other geologists proposed something different. In 1907, two researchers argued it was a laccolith, a mushroom-shaped mass of magma that never broke the surface at all, instead pushing the layers above it upward into 04:40 Speaker A a dome before erosion stripped the dome away and left the hardened core standing exposed. This theory was popular partly because laccoliths were the hot topic in American geology at the time, studied extensively in the deserts of Utah. 04:56 Speaker A It's still the label used on official USGS topographic maps today. There's just one issue. A true laccolith bends the rock layers around it upward into a bulge. At Devil's Tower, the surrounding sedimentary layers lie flat. 05:14 Speaker A No dome, no bulge. The evidence that would confirm the laccolith theory simply isn't there and hasn't been there this whole time, even as the label kept getting reprinted on official government maps. 05:26 Speaker A A third camp calls it something simpler: a stock, a relatively uniform blob of hardened magma with no dramatic shape at all. The National Park Service itself leans toward this as the least assumption-heavy explanation, but simplest 05:44 Speaker A isn't the same as proven. It's the geological equivalent of a shrug. And then in 2015, a research team reopened the whole question in the journal Geosphere. Using magnetic flow analysis and thermal modeling, they proposed something almost nobody had considered. That Devil's Tower isn't a 06:03 Speaker A plug or a laccolith or a stock at all, but a lava coulee, a thick slow-moving tongue of viscous lava that was emplaced not through open-air eruption, but into the crater of a specific kind of explosive volcano called a maar volcano. 06:20 Speaker A They based the comparison on a similar rock formation in the Czech Republic and on the presence of unusual pyroclastic debris nearby that earlier researchers had overlooked. It's the newest theory backed by real modeling and it still hasn't settled the argument. If 06:36 Speaker A anything, it proved the debate was never actually closed. More than a century after Carpenter's first paper, scientists were still fundamentally disagreeing about what this rock even is. Here's the detail that should bother you most. The very erosion that carved 06:54 Speaker A Devil's Tower out of the landscape, the process that made it visible and famous, is the same erosion that destroyed the evidence that would tell us exactly how it formed. The proof and the mystery were created by the same event. You 07:09 Speaker A can't have one without losing the other. The National Park Service says this outright on its own signage. No theory has ever been conclusively proven because the evidence needed to prove any of them eroded away millions of years ago. 07:24 Speaker A If the shape is disputed, you'd hope the age at least was locked down. It isn't. 07:31 Speaker A For decades, the number you'd find in almost every book, every museum placard, every park ranger's talk was 40.5 million years old. That figure comes from a single 1961 study published in the journal Science using potassium-argon dating on the tower's feldspar crystals. 07:50 Speaker A It was groundbreaking science for its time. It was also, by the standards of modern dating techniques, imprecise. The original paper reported a margin of error of plus or minus 4%, which sounds small until you realize 4% of 40 million 08:07 Speaker A years is over a million and a half years of uncertainty. Then, in 2002, a different research team ran a more advanced version of the same test called argon-argon dating, which uses the same radioactive decay principle, but 08:21 Speaker A isolates the results with far greater precision, catching contamination and alteration that older methods miss. 08:28 Speaker A Their result: Devil's Tower is roughly 49 million years old, almost 9 million years older than the number everyone had been repeating for four decades. And they found the exact same age within a rounding error at the nearby Missouri 08:42 Speaker A Buttes, a separate rock formation that most people have never heard of, suggesting the two sites came from the same magmatic event. Here's where it gets uncomfortable. That 2002 result was presented as a conference abstract, not a fully peer-reviewed journal paper, 08:58 Speaker A which means it occupies an odd middle ground in the scientific record, taken seriously by specialists, but never elevated. 09:12 Speaker A And so decades later, you can still find National Park Service pages using the old 40.5 million-year figure right alongside newer NPS pages that quietly site 49 million years as if two different departments of the same agency never had the conversation. Nobody 09:30 Speaker A corrected the record. They just let both numbers keep circulating. That inconsistency didn't go unnoticed. Young Earth creationist organizations have specifically targeted Devil's Tower's age discrepancy as evidence that radiometric dating itself can't be trusted, arguing instead that the tower 09:50 Speaker A formed rapidly during a global flood roughly 4,500 years ago. To be clear, this is not a competing scientific theory. It's a religious framework applied after the fact to dismiss a method that has been independently verified across thousands of geological 10:05 Speaker A sites worldwide. But the fact that mainstream science [music] handed them a genuine unresolved discrepancy to point at two different ages for the same rock, both published by credentialed geologists, is exactly the kind of gap that makes a shaky argument sound more 10:22 Speaker A credible than it should. The confusion is real. The conclusion drawn from it is [music] not. So the tower shape is disputed. Its age is disputed. What about the thing everyone photographs? 10:35 Speaker A Those enormous vertical columns that make it instantly recognizable from space. Surely that part is simple physics. It is physics. But it's stranger than it looks. Columnar jointing happens when a large mass of cooling magma contracts and cracks under 10:50 Speaker A stress. And the most efficient way for that stress to release is through fractures meeting at roughly 120° angles, which naturally tends to produce six-sided columns, though you'll find columns with four, five, and seven sides mixed in. You've probably seen smaller 11:07 Speaker A versions of this at places like Giants Causeway in Ireland or California's Devil's Post [music] Pile. What makes Devil's Tower different is scale. Its columns can reach 20 ft across [music] and run the full height of 600 ft, dramatically larger than almost anywhere 11:24 Speaker A else on the planet, which is why geologists call it the world's largest example of columnar jointing. There's another detail buried in that structure that took decades to properly explain. 11:36 Speaker A Near the base, the columns lean outward at an angle. Toward the core, they straighten into near-perfect verticals, an arrangement geologists call an inverted fan. For years, this was just an oddity nobody could fully account for. Then, in 2018, a team of 11:55 Speaker A volcanologists ran an experiment that had never been attempted before. They took real basalt from an Icelandic volcano, heated it to melting, and precisely measured the exact temperature at which it fractured into columns as it cooled, publishing the results in Nature 12:12 Speaker A Communications. They found the cracking doesn't happen at the melting point. It happens well below it, between 840 and 890° C. And the speed of cooling directly controls the size of the columns. Slower cooling producing the massive columns you see at 12:27 Speaker A Devil's Tower. That single experiment did something remarkable. It turned a formation people had been staring at for over a century into a working thermometer, a frozen record of exactly how a magma body cooled millions of years ago, written in stone and legible 12:44 Speaker A today. NASA scientists have since used Devil's Tower's jointing pattern as a comparison model for eerily similar structures photographed on the surface of Mars. 12:55 Speaker A Some of them sitting inside craters scientists believe once held liquid water. The same fracture pattern carved into a Wyoming rock is now being used to study a planet nobody has ever stood on. 13:06 Speaker A The rock, in other words, is not done talking. But here's the part that should really unsettle you. Everything so far, the shape debate, the age discrepancy, the column physics, all of that is the story geologists have been arguing about 13:19 Speaker A since the 1880s. It is not the oldest story about this place. Long before Carpenter published his first theory in 1888, long before Roosevelt signed anything, this rock already had a name, and it wasn't the one on the sign. 13:35 Speaker A Today, the National Park Service states plainly that more than two dozen Native American tribes hold this formation sacred. Tribes across the plains, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Arapjo, Shosonyi, and Kyoa. And almost every one of them independently arrived 13:55 Speaker A at some version of the same name. In Lakota, it's Matipula, Bear Lodge. In Cheyenne, it's called Bear's Lodge. 14:04 Speaker A Sometimes Bear's tepee. The Crow call it Bear's House. The Arapjo call it Bears Tepee [music] as well. Only the Kyoa break the pattern, calling it so Aal tree rock, which fits with their own distinct migration history separate from 14:18 Speaker A the northern plains tribes. The overlap across unrelated languages and [music] nations, all converging on a bear, is not a coincidence. It comes from a shared origin story that predates any written record of this place. The story varies in the details depending on which 14:35 Speaker A tribe tells it, but the bones of it stay the same. Children, usually described as a group of girls, sometimes a group of brothers, are out playing when a massive bear begins to chase them. In the Kaioa version documented in 1897 and later 14:51 Speaker A retold by writer N. Scott Made, the girls climb onto a low rock to escape, and the rock itself rises beneath them, lifting them into the sky and out of the bear's reach. Furious, the bear claws at the sides of the rising stone, breaking 15:07 Speaker A deep vertical grooves into it as it climbs after them and fails. The girls keep rising until they become the seven stars of the Pletes, permanently out of reach. and the claw marks stay behind on the rock forever. Lakota versions tell 15:21 Speaker A it with either six or seven children, sometimes rescued instead by a giant eagle who carries them home. Arapo versions connect it to the same star cluster. Crow versions describe two girls saved when the great spirit makes the rock grow beneath them. Now look at 15:36 Speaker A the tower again. Those deep vertical evenly spaced columns the exact feature geologists have spent over a century trying to mathematically explain through cooling rates and fracture angles were explained by the people who lived alongside this landscape as claw marks 15:54 Speaker A left by a bear centuries before anyone had the tools to measure a joint pattern or run an argon argon test. two completely different knowledge systems arriving at the same physical detail from two entirely different directions. 16:09 Speaker A One explains the columns through geocchemistry. The other explains them through story. Neither one requires the other to be wrong for the vertical grooves to be real. So if this rock had a name, a real name tied to a real 16:22 Speaker A living shared cultural memory long before any American expedition arrived, how did it end up with the name Devil's Tower? 16:32 Speaker A That answer takes us to 1875, and it is not a flattering one. Non-native [music] scouts had already noted the tower once before in 1859 without any of what came next attaching to it. It was the 1875 expedition that 16:50 Speaker A changed everything. In that year, Colonel Richard Irving Dodge led an armed expedition into the Black Hills region. officially framed as scientific exploration, but conducted in direct violation of the 1868 treaty that had guaranteed the Black Hills to the 17:10 Speaker A Lakota and their allies. The expedition followed closely on the heels of Kuster's 1874 announcement that gold had been found in the region, and it functioned, whether Dodge called it that or not, as reconnaissance for the land grab that followed. Somewhere during 17:27 Speaker A that expedition, according to Dodge's own account, an interpreter rendered a native name for the formation as Bad God's Tower. Dodge shortened it in his notes and later in his published book to Devil's Tower, and the name stuck in 17:40 Speaker A American maps and records from that point forward. Here's the detail that undercuts the whole story. The National Park Service states there is no historical evidence that any tribe ever associated this place with an evil spirit or a bad god. None. Linguists 17:58 Speaker A studying the Lakota language have noted something else instead. The word for a bad spirit and the word for a black bear sound remarkably close to each other when spoken quickly and filtered through a rushed, imperfect translation during an armed government expedition that had 18:15 Speaker A every incentive not to slow down and get it right. Maps published between 1874 and 1901, before Dodge's name fully took hold, still labeled the formation Bear Lodge [music] or Bears Lodge. The evidence points toward a mistransation made in passing during a military 18:32 Speaker A incursion onto land that wasn't legally the government's to explore that permanently rewrote the identity of a sacred site into something ominous and demonic. 18:42 Speaker A It gets pettier still. When Roosevelt signed the 1906 proclamation, making it the first national monument, the official paperwork dropped the apostrophe, turning Devil's Tower into Devil's Tower, a spelling now baked permanently into every federal record, every park sign, every map, thanks 19:03 Speaker A either to a clerical slip, or to a naming board policy against possessive apostrophes. A rushed mistransation cemented by a missing punctuation mark is the entire foundation of the name tens of millions of people now associate with this place. 19:20 Speaker A Tribes never stopped calling it Bear Lodge. And starting in the early 2000s, they started fighting to make that the official name again. In 2005, a formal proposal went to the US Board on Geographic Names to designate the site 19:37 Speaker A Bear Lodge National Historic Landmark. It was opposed by a Wyoming congresswoman who argued the change would confuse tourists and damage the local tourism economy. The proposal stalled in November 2014. Chief Arval looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Great Sue Nation, submitted a 19:58 Speaker A renewed and more forceful proposal, formally requesting the board rename the geographic feature Bear Lodge and the monument itself Bear Lodge National Historic Landmark. Public comment ran through 2015. A Wyoming state senator whose district includes the site pushed back hard, arguing that Bear Lodge is 20:19 Speaker A just as wrong as Devil's Tower since more than 20 tribes each have their own distinct name for the formation and no single alternative can claim to be the correct one. It's a fair point wrapped around a convenient outcome because the 20:33 Speaker A practical effect of that argument, whether intended or not, is that the existing colonial name stays exactly where it is by default. 20:42 Speaker A Then Wyoming's congressional delegation did something that effectively froze the entire process because the board on geographic names will not act on a naming proposal while related legislation is pending before Congress. 20:56 Speaker A Wyoming senators along with a future senator then serving in the House began introducing bills starting in 2015 specifically to protect the name Devil's Tower by law. As long as one of those bills sits in Congress, the renaming proposal cannot legally move forward, 21:14 Speaker A regardless of what the board might otherwise decide. It is a procedural stalemate engineered and re-engineered for a decade, and it is still running. 21:24 Speaker A That same delegation reintroduced the identical protective legislation again in January 2025. But the pressure didn't disappear. In June 2024, the Federal Reconciliation and Place Names Committee, a subcommittee that exists specifically to review offensive federal place names, met in Rapid City and formally 21:48 Speaker A recommended that the Secretary of the Interior rename both the tower and the surrounding unincorporated community to Bear Lodge, citing testimony that more than 20 tribes consider the current name offensive and invoking a specific federal statute that allows the 22:07 Speaker A secretary to act directly if the board itself fails to act within a reasonable time frame. The committee's chair pointed out that tribes had been formally pushing for this change since [music] 1998. 22:20 Speaker A That's 26 years of paperwork, testimony, and stalled proposals sitting behind a name that most visitors never think to question when they read it off a highway sign. And there's a legal wrinkle underneath all of it that makes this 22:35 Speaker A fight uniquely stubborn. Wyoming has a special statutory carveout written into federal law that requires explicit congressional authorization before any national monument in the state can be created or expanded under the Antiquities Act, the exact law Roosevelt used in 1906. 22:55 Speaker A That means even a fully successful renaming push at the board on geographic names might still collide with a second separate legal wall specific to this one state. The bureaucracy protecting this name [music] isn't accidental. It's layered deliberately more than once. 23:16 Speaker A So here is where the naming fight sits right now. A committee has recommended the change Chief Arval looking asked for in 2014. 23:25 Speaker A Legislation to block it has been reintroduced. A local politician argues, "No name can satisfy every tribe," while doing nothing to restore the name that predates the mistransation in the first place. The sign at the entrance still reads Devil's Tower, a name born from a 23:41 Speaker A rushed interpreter, a violated treaty, and a punctuation error still standing after a century and a half. Looking Horse has never withdrawn his request. 23:51 Speaker A It simply has nowhere left in Washington to go. The naming fight isn't the only unresolved conflict written into this rock. There's a second one playing out every summer involving the people who climb it. 24:05 Speaker A The first recorded ascent happened on July 4th, 1893 when two local ranchers built a wooden ladder nearly 350 ft long, wedged into a vertical crack on the tower's southeast face, and climbed to the summit in front of a crowd of 24:21 Speaker A spectators, gathered specifically to watch them plant an American flag on Independence Day. That ladder stayed in use for over three decades, and roughly 215 people climbed it before it was finally retired in 1927. Its remains are still there today, listed on the 24:38 Speaker A National Register of Historic Places. Modern technical climbing arrived in 1937 when a climber led an American Alpine Club team up the sheerface using ropes and hardware rather than a fixed ladder, opening the tower to the kind of climbing that continues today. The 24:56 Speaker A following year, two more climbers pioneered what's still the most popular line to the summit. A route named Durren, still crowded with ropes every climbing season, nine decades later. By the early 1990s, that climbing culture had grown from a few hundred visitors a 25:12 Speaker A year into thousands with hundreds of permanent bolts drilled directly into the rock face. And for the tribes who consider this place sacred, that growth collided directly with ceremony. June is the most significant month on the site's spiritual calendar tied to the summer 25:29 Speaker A solstice, and it's when sundance ceremonies, vision quests, and prayer offerings are traditionally conducted at the base of the tower. Climbers scaling the rock face during those same weeks, hammering bolts and shouting beta to each other from the cliffside created 25:46 Speaker A exactly the kind of collision you'd expect between recreation and reverence, happening in the same physical space at the same time. 25:54 Speaker A After three years of negotiation between the National Park Service, tribal representatives, and the climbing community, the Park Service issued a 1995 climbing management plan that asked climbers to voluntarily avoid the tower entirely during the month of June, not a 26:10 Speaker A legal ban, a request. Climbing groups had [music] specifically pushed for self-regulation over a mandatory closure, and the Park Service agreed. Some climbers refused to accept even that. In 1996, a group of climbers and a commercial guide sued the federal 26:27 Speaker A government, arguing the voluntary closure violated the Constitution's separation of church and state by favoring one religious practice over recreational rights. The case worked its way through federal court for 3 years. 26:40 Speaker A In 1998, a district court ruled against the climbers. In 1999, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling on the grounds that because the closure was purely voluntary and carried no legal penalty for ignoring it, the climbers 26:56 Speaker A had suffered no actual injury to sue over in the first place. The Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal in 2000. The voluntary closure survived, not because a court declared it sacred, but because it was too gentle on paper 27:12 Speaker A to violate anyone's rights. That legal technicality turned out to matter more than anyone expected. 27:19 Speaker A Because the closure has no force of law, its success depends entirely on climbers choosing to respect it year after year with nothing but social pressure and cultural awareness behind it. And remarkably, most of them do. According to the National Park Service, the number 27:37 Speaker A of climbers who voluntarily avoid the tower every June has resulted in roughly an 85% reduction in climbing activity that month compared to the rest of the year. It isn't zero. Some climbers still go up in June anyway. sometimes fewer 27:55 Speaker A than 300 in a given year. And the park service still records exactly how many, publishing the numbers annually like a scoreboard nobody quite wants to be on. 28:07 Speaker A It's not a resolved conflict. It's a fragile truce held together by voluntary compliance and a lawsuit that failed for the right reasons. 28:18 Speaker A And through all of it, the tower kept becoming more famous for reasons that had nothing to do with geology or treaty law at all. When Steven Spielberg's production team scouted locations for close encounters of the third kind in 28:32 Speaker A 1976, they picked Devil's Tower specifically because of its strange singular silhouette, a shape unlike anything else in the American landscape. exactly the kind of otherworldly backdrop the film needed for its climactic alien contact scene. The film became a cultural 28:52 Speaker A phenomenon on release in 1977, and the tower's association with it never faded. The nearby KOA campground, built partly on land used during filming, has projected the movie onto an outdoor screen every summer night since 1986, with the actual tower visible looming 29:12 Speaker A behind the projection screen. A genuinely strange image if you stop to think about it. Tourists watching a Hollywood fantasy about the rock while sitting directly in front of the rock itself. Visitor numbers climbed steadily in the decade since, reaching an 29:29 Speaker A all-time recorded high of over 550,000 visitors in 2021 alone. a sacred site, a scientific puzzle, and a movie backdrop. 29:41 Speaker A All occupying the exact same 1,347 acres of federal land, each pulling the meaning of the place in a different direction. 29:51 Speaker A The rock, meanwhile, keeps quietly generating new evidence nobody asked for. In 2006, after climbers reported that an 8 m section of stone on the popular Durance climbing route seemed to shift slightly underfoot, geologists from the US Geological Survey investigated and 30:11 Speaker A found a real structural failure, a support pedestal beneath what's now called the leaning column, showing signs of tensile spalling, a slow internal cracking that could eventually cause the column to topple onto the route below. 30:24 Speaker A They didn't find climbers capable of dislodging it through weight alone, but they painted markers across the failure zone to track whether it kept spreading, turning one of the towers most climbed sections into an ongoing, quietly monitored structural hazard. The 30:39 Speaker A mountain climbers love is also in one specific 8 m stretch, slowly breaking apart beneath them. Then in October 2024, researchers placed a seismometer directly on the summit for 21 hours alongside sensors at the base to measure how the entire tower structure resonates 30:59 Speaker A and sways in response to the natural background vibration of the Earth itself. The same kind of monitoring used on skyscrapers and bridges to understand how a massive structure moves. A rock formation that has stood since roughly 49 million years ago, whose columns were 31:16 Speaker A shaped by cooling temperatures, scientists only pinned down in 2018, is still in the year this documentary was made, wearing sensors like a patient hooked up to a heart monitor, still generating new data nobody has fully interpreted yet. And underneath all of 31:32 Speaker A that modern instrumentation, the older human layer of the site never stopped either. Walk the Tower Trail today and you'll see small strips of cloth tied to the branches of trees ringing the base. 31:44 Speaker A Prayer offerings left by tribal members alongside signs asking visitors not to touch or remove them. Archaeologists surveying the monument in 1991 documented a stone and wood shelter structure likely used [music] historically for vision quests. Still standing quietly in the landscape most 32:04 Speaker A tourists walk straight past on their way to the gift shop. Workers digging a sewage line through the monument in 1997 turned up something even older. Marine fossils sealed inside rock that once sat at the bottom of an ancient inland sea. 32:19 Speaker A Proof that this whole desert plane was underwater long before it was anything sacred at all. So, here's where [music] the story actually leaves you. Not with an answer, but with three separate cracks running simultaneously through the same rock. Geologists still argue 32:37 Speaker A over whether this is a stock, a plug, or a lava koollay frozen inside an ancient volcanic crater. And they still can't agree whether the tower is 40 1/2 million years old or closer to 49 because the very forces that exposed 32:50 Speaker A [music] it also destroyed the proof that would settle the question. A federal committee has formally recommended restoring the name Chief Arval looking horse asked for a decade ago while Wyoming's delegation keeps legislation alive specifically to keep that recommendation from ever taking legal 33:09 Speaker A effect. And every June, hundreds of climbers still choose entirely voluntarily whether to scale a sacred site during its most spiritually significant month, a fragile agreement held together by nothing but goodwill. Because the one time it was tested in court, it survived 33:28 Speaker A only by being too gentle to be legally enforcable in the first place. None of these three fights need the others to be true. The geology doesn't depend on the naming dispute. The naming dispute doesn't depend on the climbing 33:42 Speaker A controversy, but they're all happening on the exact same 867 ft of rock at the exact same time, and none of them are finished. The sign at the entrance still reads Devil's Tower. The columns still run in perfect vertical lines that one 33:58 Speaker A culture reads as claw marks and another reads as a frozen cooling curve. And neither explanation has managed to erase the other. The bolts are still drilled into the rock face. The prayer cloths are still tied to the trees below it. 34:12 Speaker A And somewhere in a Wyoming congressional office, a bill sits quietly doing exactly what it was designed to do. 34:19 Speaker A Nothing indefinitely keeping a century and a half old mistake permanently, technically unresolved. Somewhere nearby, a campground screen is still playing a movie about aliens landing on it with the real rock rising silently behind the projection. 34:37 Speaker A The tower hasn't moved in 49 million years. Everything around it is still arguing about what to call it. Topics: Devils Tower Wyoming geology Native American Bear Lodge volcanic formation Antiquities Act Close Encounters of the Third Kind rock formation geological debate --- This is the markdown twin of https://sozai.app/transcript/wyoming-devils-tower-mystery/ — the same content, without the markup. Published by SozAI (https://sozai.app). Reuse and quotation are allowed with attribution and a link back. Machine-readable index: https://sozai.app/llms.txt · data API: https://sozai.app/api/