Sept 5-Devil's Tower

Devil's Tower National Monument-the afternoon of September 5th-Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed Devil's Tower the nation's first National Monument in 1906. It is beautiful, sticking up in the middle of rolling plains and pine forests. We walked around the base of the tower--about a mile and a half. I thought it was columnar basalt, but it's columns are MUCH larger--and now I forget the type of rock, but not basalt. The theory is that molten rock was forced up into sedimentary rock about 60 million years ago-never reaching the surface of the earth. It cooled underground. Millions of years of erosion exposed the tower.