The Wyoming plains stretch flat and endless in every direction until something impossible interrupts the horizon. A tower of stone columns rises abruptly from rolling grassland, defying explanation and drawing pilgrims of two very different kinds—those seeking the sacred, and those seeking the climb. This formation, known as Bear Lodge to the Lakota and a dozen other Plains nations, has stood witness to thousands of years of human wonder, spiritual ceremony, and scientific puzzlement. Yet despite generations of study and reverence, one fundamental question remains unanswered: how did it arrive here at all?
The Rock That Grew Overnight (In Geological Time)
The formation rises 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River, standing 867 feet from summit to base, visible from miles across the high plains like an accidental skyscraper. What draws the eye upward most powerfully are the columns—massive vertical pillars of stone that fit together with an almost architectural precision, as if carved by patient hands rather than shaped by subterranean forces over millions of years.
Geologists agree on little else about this place. The Tower was formed by the intrusion of igneous material, but geologists cannot agree on exactly how that process took place. When early scientists examined the structure in the late 1800s, they first theorised it was volcanic. But there was no pyroclastic material, tephra, lava, or volcanic rock in the surrounding landscape, which made this explanation untenable.
By 1907, two geologists named Darton and O’Hara proposed a different mechanism: a laccolith. The theory held that magma, rising upward through the Earth’s crust, encountered a layer of sedimentary rock and could not breakthrough to the surface. Instead, the molten rock spread horizontally beneath the overlying layers, creating a bulge. As the magma cooled extremely slowly, it crystallised into a distinctive columnar structure. During the Paleocene Epoch, 56 to 66 million years ago, magma rose through the crust, intruding into the existing sedimentary rock layers, and the columnar jointing formed as the rock contracted during cooling.
Over millions of additional years, the softer sedimentary rocks surrounding this resistant core eroded away—dissolved by water, ground down by wind, carried off by the Belle Fourche River. What remains is what we see today: the hardened heart of an ancient intrusion, exposed and standing alone.
Yet even this explanation carries uncertainty. Recent research suggests an alternative origin as a lava coulée emplaced into a maar-diatreme volcano, a theory that raises more questions than it settles. The truth is that Bear Lodge guards its secrets carefully. Scientists may know what it is made of, but the exact process of its becoming remains contested ground.
When Bears Clawed the Sky
Long before geologists arrived with their theories and instruments, the Lakota people held this place in their stories. The great mystery present in all living things—what they call the Daku Shka Shka, the living energy that exists on all things—stones, earth, plants, stars, everything—found its voice in the legend of Mato Tipila.
The story tells of seven girls who strayed farther and farther from their camp whilst playing. Suddenly they found themselves encircled by bears who meant to kill them. Terrified and too far away to run for safety, the girls prayed to Wakan Tanka, the great Creator. Their desperation became a plea heard across the spirit world.
A voice spoke from the sky, commanding them to stand upon a small mound of earth. As they climbed it, the mound began to rise upward, transforming into a tower that reached toward the heavens. The bears lunged at its sides, clawing frantically as it ascended, but they could not reach the girls. The bears’ desperate scratches caused huge spires of rock to tumble down, crushing them one by one beneath falling stone.
The vertical grooves that cover Bear Lodge’s face—those precise columnar fractures that so fascinate geologists—became the claw marks of Mato, the great bear. A story carved into stone by time and prayer.
This legend exists in variations across the Kiowa, Cheyenne, Crow, and Arapaho nations. In some versions, the girls were lifted safely into the sky and became the stars of the Pleiades, their constellation visible above the formation during autumn evenings. In others, young men find refuge on the tower, saved by the intervention of Wanblee the eagle. What unites all these narratives is a common thread: a sacred place of protection, where the Earth itself responds to human vulnerability and the Great Spirit’s compassion.
A Name Lost in Translation, A Legacy Reclaimed
For thousands of years, dozens of tribe members knew this formation by names that meant something sacred. To the Lakota, the tower is known as Mato Tipila, which translates to Bear Lodge. The Crow, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and others possessed their own names, each encoding the spiritual significance of the place.
Then in 1875, everything changed. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge led a scientific expedition to the Black Hills. His interpreter reportedly mistranslated the Indigenous name Mato Tipila as “Bad God’s Tower,” which Dodge then shortened to “Devils Tower”. This single error of translation—whether accidental or deliberate—stuck to the place like sediment hardening into rock.
For 150 years, the landscape carried a name that belonged to no one. The tower became “Devil’s” in official documents and tourist pamphlets. Maps were printed. Roads were signed. The name calcified into law. Yet the tribal nations that had always held this site sacred questioned why it retained an English name that reflected no part of their understanding or reverence for the place.
In recent years, efforts to restore the original designation have grown stronger. A proposal exists to change the name to Bear Lodge, though this can only occur by congressional action or a Presidential Proclamation. The landscape waits, patient as stone, for its true name to be spoken again in the places that matter.
A Sacred Site Where Prayers Are Tied To Trees
Standing near the base of Bear Lodge today, visitors encounter something that cannot be explained by geology alone. Coloured cloths and woven bundles hang from low branches in trees surrounding the monument’s foundation. These are prayer ties—offerings left by Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and other tribal members who journey here to connect with something greater than themselves.
Throughout the year, but especially in June, tribes perform ceremonies such as sweat lodges, vision quests, and group rituals like the Sun Dance. The month of June holds particular spiritual significance. Since 1996, a voluntary climbing closure has been implemented each June out of respect for the cultural activities of Native Americans, resulting in an 85% reduction in climbing during that month. Most of the world’s climbers, understanding the weight of this request, choose to stay off the rock during that sacred season.
For tribal visitors, Bear Lodge is not merely a historical landmark or a geological formation to be studied from a distance. When they come to the site to worship, fast, and celebrate, many speak of the experience as a homecoming—a spiritual return to a place whose sacredness spans generations. The rock itself seems to listen. The wind moving through the columns carries prayer. The ground beneath your feet holds thousands of years of footsteps seeking what cannot be found anywhere else.
The Climbers Who Challenge the Columns
Every year, approximately 4,500 climbers ascend the Tower, drawn by its unique technical challenges and its place in climbing history. The formation presents one of North America’s most distinctive climbing experiences: the columnar jointing that creates natural cracks running vertically up the stone face demands a specific technique. Climbers must wedge their hands and feet into these narrow fissures, moving upward through a form of climbing that exists nowhere else on Earth quite like this.
The first ascent occurred in 1893 when two local ranchers, determined to reach the summit, drove wooden stakes into a crack on the southeast face, creating a makeshift 350-foot ladder. That rudimentary approach has evolved. Modern climbers use ropes, protection gear, and decades of accumulated knowledge about the safest and most efficient ways to move across these columns.
Yet climbing here carries a weight that ascents on other formations do not. This is sacred ground. That tension—between the climber’s desire to push their body and skill to the limit, and the knowledge that this place belongs to cultures whose prayers have echoed here for thousands of years—creates an unusual form of respect. Most climbers honour the June voluntary closure, with approximately 85% choosing not to climb during that month, a remarkable level of voluntary compliance that suggests the climbing community understands something beyond sport.
Stone Speaking to Stone, Across Time
Today, Bear Lodge National Monument draws more than half a million visitors annually. They come for different reasons—to hike the paved trail circling the base, to photograph the tower in morning light, to seek professional climbing guides, or simply to stand at the base and look upward, trying to comprehend something that seems too large, too precise, too perfectly impossible to exist.
The formation was established as the first United States national monument by President Theodore Roosevelt on September 24, 1906, a designation that simultaneously protected the place and, in a way, claimed it. The monument now exists under shared stewardship—the National Park Service managing its preservation, tribal nations maintaining their centuries-old relationship with its spiritual essence.
Both stories matter. The geological account speaks to human curiosity about the deep time beneath our feet, the patient work of magma and erosion reshaping the world. The spiritual account speaks to something equally profound: the human capacity to sense the sacred, to find meaning in landscape, to understand that some places carry power not because of their measurements but because of what they have witnessed and enabled.
Bear Lodge—whether you call it by its English name or its true one—stands at the intersection of these two ways of knowing. Science has not explained it fully. Spirit will never need explanation. The tower continues its patient work, gathering light and shadow each day, holding ceremony and conversation, remaining itself. In a world that changes constantly, there is something anchoring about a stone that has watched over Wyoming for 50 million years and will watch over it for 50 million more.
The mark of bears’ claws remains visible on its face. The prayers of those who come seeking still rise toward its summit. And the mystery of how it came to be—that essential question that draws geologists and dreamers alike—remains written into its stone, waiting, perhaps, for the right question to finally be asked.
