The Snowy Range mountains tower to over 12,000 feet, and you can still find snow on the summits in August! Vacationers come to this area now for rock climbing. Vedauwoo (say it like this: vee-da-voo) is one of the best climbing spots in Wyoming. Vedauwoo is from the Arapaho word for "earthborn."
America's first national monument, Devil's Tower, is found here. It's a plateaued "rock" almost 1,300 feet higher than the surrounding land, and looks as though some gigantic grizzly tried to claw it's way to the top somewhere in the mists of time gone by. There are more than two dozen Indian tribes that venerate this place including the Lakota, Crow, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Shoshone and Arapaho
(Sorry about the glare, but it's a better picture than I could have taken... Can you imagine the bear trying to claw his way to being king of the mountain?) If this image looks familiar, think "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Geologists have come up with a dozen different ways this thing might have been formed, but they haven't settled for sure on any of them. Some think it may have been the plug of a volcanic cone, some think it may be the cone itself. Most agree it was formed by the forced intrusion of igneous material (think icky thick lava trying to escape through layers of rock that won't give), and then over eons the surrounding material eroded. I don't have to be a geologist to know this is a pretty cool critter though.
And then there's Fossil Butte National Monument in Lincoln County, Wyoming.
Did you know that Wyoming was once almost identical to what we now know as Florida? That's why one of the richest fossil deposits in the whole wide world can be found in land-locked Wyoming.
Who knew? Now we both do!
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