What a Long, Fun Journey It’s Been
We went out to do some all-sky photography this summer and along the way had a great tour of the northwestern quadrant of the U.S. Throughout most of July, we checked out such wonderful sights as Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming.
This is probably one of the most iconic igneous intrusions in the world because it was the star of the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
Unlike in the movie, however, it’s not fenced off by evil government bad guys trying to hide UFOs and LGMs from an unsuspecting populace. You can drive up to it, hike pretty much all around it, and once you see it, you’ll realize that the scale of it is incredibly amazing. Basically, however, there’s NO way that a UFO as big as the one in the movie could have landed, and I’m guessing just from hiking around it, that there’s no way you could fit a runway up top. But, hey, why let scientific accuracy get in the way of trying to tell a good story, eh?
The monument itself is way cooler in “person” than any movie can make it out to be. What you see here is a tower of lava that once was underground. It erupted into sedimentary rock layers laid down hundreds of millions of years ago. Those layers eroded away (because sedimentary rock is easily eroded by rain and wind), leaving behind the much stronger and tougher igneous “throat” standing there. I thought that perhaps this had once been the throat of a long-eroded volcano, but it turns out not be so. In any case, it’s an amazing place to visit and we spent half a day crawling around taking pictures and hiking the up to the base of the formation.
As it turned out, it’s the second time in two years we’ve hiked around some fetching volcanic intrusions. In 2006 in Australia, we visited a similar kind of intrusive igneous formation called “Sawn Rocks” at Mt. Kaputar Monument in the Nandewar Range near Narrabri. In this case, the whole range was volcanic, and these rocks are what’s left of the columns of extruded igneous rock after erosion has taken away the overlying soil.
Volcanism rules!!
