I ran 10 km at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming…

It was a spiritual place for the native Americans. One story has 7 maidens fleeing from a great bear and the bears claw marks are on the tower. The maidens took refuge at the top and were taken up to heaven to become the Pleiades star cluster. Even today natives go there to pray and often wrap prayer cloths around trees or leave prayer bundles. I prayed my own prayer. I asked the Great Spirit to take care of his people. To emphasize my prayer I cut my finger with my knife and left a drop of blood on the rocks. With respect. Sort of like when you were kids you cut your hand and exchanged blood with your friend thus becoming blood brothers. Now I am blood brother with the Great Spirit. OH! You didn’t do that? I forgot today’s generation is coddled and sheltered from all that stuff. I feel really sorry for today’s kids. They are missing out on a lot of stuff. Really, as kids my generation didn’t have that many serious casualties. Honest. We grew up pretty tough.

I ran three loops around the tower. One loop was slightly lower in elevation and was called the Red Rock trail. It was long and difficult since I was not used to the elevation. So I did the Red Rock Trail twice and the perimeter paved trail once for a total of just over 10 km. My home altitude in Edmonton, Alberta is only about 2000 feet ASL. During my trip I ran at elevations between 5000 and 8000 feet here, at the Little Bighorn River, in the Black Hills, and in Yellowstone. The upper loop was where all the tourists were. It was higher in elevation but shorter and also was sort of paved. I think they just filled holes in the rocky slopes and covered it with asphalt as best they could. It kind of looks like a billion year old sidewalk, ha ha.

Remember the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”? Well this is the same tower, except in reality the tower does not have a basin on top with aliens waiting for people.

Anyway, in spite of the persistent rainfall and associated winds and cold, I managed to be fortunate to find a few hours temporary relief for my training. The run was really nice in the lower Red Rock trail which runs around the perimeter of the tower. I saw whitetail deer and mule deer, turkeys, bunnies, and a lot of birds and wildflowers such as yucca, prickly pear cactus, and of course there were a lot of flowers and plants I did not know. In spite of the rains, the brilliant red colored shale trail was not as muddy as I was led to believe. I was still able to run it safely. It was a hilly trail with spectacular views. Because of the elevation and the hills I was pretty winded. The run was fairly uneventful apart from the lone mule deer I saw which followed me very closely on the trail and in general the wildlife there was not at all afraid of me. The most frightened were the whitetail deer which usually ran off. Except perhaps for the tourists, they were the most frightened of all.

The tower:

Close up of the tower showing the columnar fracture of the igneous rock. Also there are some climbers to give scale to the columns, and the rubble pile at the base of the tower over which they slapped some asphalt for the perimeter trail. And another view of the tower from the back side of the lower Red Rock trail which hardly anyone bothers to visit. Some natives resent the climbers for spiritual reasons. They feel it desecrates the tower. I personally think that there are enough mountains to climb that this one might be exempted with the exception of scientific study. Let’s give this one back to the natives.

Here are some images of what I saw on the trail during my run: