Devils Tower, northeastern Wyoming — 867 feet of columnar basalt rising from green farmland with the improbable confidence of a geological full stop.
We left before the storm arrived and drove Wyoming east to west in a single sustained push — the kind of driving that begins in mountain passes and ends in prairie, the temperature swinging from 34°F to 60°F between those two conditions, the landscape transitioning from snow-capped range to high plain to deep grass basin in a way that compresses the state's enormous ecological diversity into a single day's windshield. Near Gillette, the dust storm arrived without warning: a wall of pale orange that reduced visibility to a quarter mile, lasted twenty minutes, and then — just as abruptly — was gone. Wyoming is not a state that asks permission before doing things.
Devils Tower is in the northeastern corner of Wyoming, in country that becomes progressively greener and more gentle as you approach it: rolling farmland, good grass, fences and cattle and the agricultural peace of a landscape that has figured out how to be productive. And then the tower. Eight hundred and sixty-seven feet of columnar basalt rising from those green hills with the serene self-confidence of something that has been there since before the hills and will be there long after them. The columns — hexagonal, formed by the cooling and contraction of igneous rock approximately fifty million years ago — are individually visible from a considerable distance, each one a dark geometric stripe running the full height of the formation.
The geology is a common source of confusion. Devils Tower is not a volcanic plug in the sense of erupted lava, but rather a laccolithic structure — magma that intruded into surrounding sedimentary rock, cooled and solidified underground into this form, and was subsequently exposed by millions of years of erosion removing the softer rock around it. What you see is the resistant igneous core; the mountain that once surrounded it is gone. The tower is sacred to at least twenty Native American tribes, who have their own names for it — Matȟó Thípila (Bear Lodge) in Lakota, among others — and use it in ceremony and story. The name Devils Tower was applied by a US Army expedition in 1875 and is based on a mistranslation of a Lakota term. The current name is an administrative persistence that many of the tribes involved have formally requested be changed.
The campground around the tower's base was closed for the season. We made a full circuit by road, stopped at the viewpoints, spent time with the columns and the context, and continued east. Sundance, South Dakota, twenty miles away, provided a campsite for the night with a view that didn't compete with the one we'd just left and was correctly priced accordingly.
Mount Rushmore required approximately twenty miles of increasing commercial intensity before the monument itself appeared — motels and gift shops and attraction signs building to a density that prepares you for something either very bad or very good. The monument is neither. It is medium: 60-foot carved faces of four presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln) in South Dakota's Black Hills granite, carved between 1927 and 1941 under sculptor Gutzon Borglum using a workforce of over four hundred, dynamite, jackhammers, and a remarkable absence of fatalities given the conditions. The faces are technically accomplished. The location is, if you look at it honestly, questionable: the Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota people, taken from them by the United States government in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty when gold was discovered in 1874. The Oglala Sioux have declined the monetary settlement offered and continue to seek return of the land. The monument exists in the middle of all this history whether or not the souvenir shops reflect it.
It is also, frankly, smaller than every image suggested it would be. The small pine trees at the monument's base appear, in photographs, to be sixty feet tall, granting the mountain a scale it doesn't quite possess in person. They are ten to fifteen feet tall. The relative scale trick is responsible for approximately ninety percent of Mount Rushmore's photographic reputation. Up close, in full afternoon light, it is a monument to a particular moment in American self-regard, carved into land that was not available to be carved into. "A total tourist trap," we said, and meant it without rancour. The history is real. The political complexity is real. The parking costs ten dollars and the concourse is lined with state flags and the light at midday is the worst possible light for carving detail, the north-facing faces in deep even shadow. Come to terms with all of it and move on. We did.
"Devils Tower rises from green farmland with the serene self-confidence of something that has been there since before the hills, and will be there long after them."
Photography Notes — Episode Fifteen
Conditions: Devils Tower — late afternoon, clear sky, strong directional light. Mount Rushmore — midday, flat, north-facing subject — worst possible conditions for carved stone photography.
• Devils Tower at sunrise: The classic shot is from the surrounding meadow, the tower lit by low morning sun that catches each column individually, creating a gallery of parallel light-and-shadow stripes running the full height. Wide-angle from the meadow with wildflowers as foreground, tower at centre, clear sky behind — this is the composition to get up early for.
• Column detail — telephoto: A 200–400mm lens isolates individual column groups and reveals the geometric precision of the cooling fractures. Shoot in early morning or late afternoon light for maximum surface texture.
• The improbable pastoral frame: The contrast between the farmland setting and the igneous monolith is the picture. A wide composition that includes the green rolling hills, perhaps a fence line, and the tower rising above it all tells the story more completely than any tight composition of the tower alone.
• Mount Rushmore — the light problem: The faces are north-facing. Direct sunlight falls on them only at midday, which is the harshest, most contrast-flattening light for carved stone. The best photography requires either overcast conditions (which distribute light evenly across the carvings) or very long telephoto work in the brief windows of early morning or late afternoon reflected light. Accept this limitation or plan very carefully around it.m: The faces are north-facing. Direct sunlight falls on them only at midday, which is the harshest, most contrast-flattening light for carved stone. The best photography requires either overcast conditions (which distribute light evenly across the carvings) or very long telephoto work in the brief windows of early morning or late afternoon reflected light. Accept this limitation or plan very carefully around it.
• Looking for the less-photographed angles: The paved Presidential Trail that loops below the carved faces offers perspectives through the surrounding pine trees that the main concourse viewpoint doesn't — the faces partially framed by pine branches, seen at different distances and angles. Worth the walk.