June 16 Tower

Powered by green chili and elk meat stew, cheerios and too many lite beers, I'm out of Gillette early and with a solid tailwind pushing me 18 mph eastward. In a blink, I'm 30 miles done and at Moorcroft, turning north toward Devil's Tower. A brief lunch stop at DT Junction at 50 miles just in the nick of time, as the rain starts. More up and down through some very green pastureland, lightly forested and punctuated by rock outcrops and small streams. Second rain storm blows through, another change into raingear.

And then it appears. Devil's Tower is right in front of me! There is something so imposing about an 800' tall, stand alone, monolithic rock pile! 5o million years ago, magma rose up through a weak spot in the crust and hardened into a phonolite plug made up of 5,6, and 7 sided columnar segments, some up to 600' long. Gradually, the less dense surrounding rock layers eroded away, leaving Devil's Tower (Bear's Lodge in the native tongue) for all us tourists to gawk at. A bit hard to keep the cycle on the road as I go by.

Head north into the next dark cloud and get soaked again, but finally roll into Hulett, a small lumber-oriented town (pop. 405) where I get the last room in the Pioneer Motel (Let's see, I've now been in a Pioneer, a Stagecoach, a Paintbrush, a Painted Buffalo, a Sundowner, a Prairie View, etc....)

Couldn't find any good ice cream in pint form, so I ate a half-gallon of chocolate chunky...

resulting in a close encounter with a stomach ache. I did find myself mounding the ice cream up into a drippy, goo-ee pile before consuming...

Hmmm.

Hmmm..