motorcycles....trains...Devil's Tower

We and the Creans traveled 305 miles from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Devil's Tower, Wyoming in the northeast corner of the state of Wyoming.

beautiful garden in the corner of the campground

Jean is getting ready to travel today



so are Pete and Bruce

fences for blowing snow ???

in cowboy country

natural gas well

enjoy watching for wildlife along the way
the pronghorn antelope did not disappoint us

we shared travel with MANY trains today.. I thought so much of Westin Bridges...he LOVES trains.

We are back in oil drilling country



a beautiful pronghorn antelope

We shared the road with MANY motorcycles. When we arrived at the Devil's Tower View RV Park, we could hardly get into the parking lot for the motorcyclists on their ride to the tower. YES we are near Sturgis, SD and it is the BIG Biker Week!!

We set the rigs up and rode up to the Devil's Tower. This magnificent igneous intrusion is sacred to the Native Americans. The month of June closes the tower to the public due to the Native American spiritual rituals that take place. Igneous intrusion is caused by (about 50 million years ago) molten magma was forced into sedimentary rock above it and cooled underground. As it cooled it contracted and fractured into columns. over the years, erosion of the sedimentary rock exposed Devil's Tower and accentuated Little Missouri Buttes. The more known Native American names for Devil's Tower are the Lakota: Matho Thepila  ("Bear Lodge") or Ptehe Gi ("Brown Buffalo Horn). Located above the Belle Fourche River in the northeastern corner of Wyoming, it stands 5,114 feet above sea level. The 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, used the formation as a plot element and as the location of its climactic scenes.



checking in

we had to pull back into the road and turn back into the campground
to be able to park into our sites 

we finally made it into our sites
we avoided the severe drop off behind us as we came around

Native American names for Devil's Tower

closer look at the columns

 

plenty of prairie dogs

we had bikers from NC at our campground!!