We stayed overnight in a town called ‘Deadwood’, famous as the place where ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok was killed. Lots of people said we must see it – we were not greatly impressed.
We travelled on to Devil’s Tower – probably most famous after the ‘Close Encounters’ film. You really can see it from miles away
…and it just gets more impressive the closer you get. It is believed to be a plug of volcanic rock left after the rest of the volcano has been eroded away.
The vertical columns are due to stress fractures that appeared as the lava cooled. The same structure that is seen at Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, and that we were to see later in our trip in some of the layers of rock in Yellowstone.
Devil’s tower is really big. We did a walk around it and it took quite a while. There were some climbers going up it and you can get some idea of the scale from this picture. Yes that is a real person, not a toy.
At the bottom of the tower, on the way out of the park we also found some prairie dogs:
We then headed west again across Wyoming. It is really a big place, mostly empty but with a few towns like Gillette that had relatively rare industrial plant, in this case we think it was a power station
but mostly it was just a lot of open road and huge skies as we headed over to Buffalo.
