9 Secrets Devils Tower Has Hidden for Millions of Years — And They’re Surfacing Now

Devil's Tower has been standing in northeastern Wyoming for somewhere between 40 and 49 million years. Nobody has ever agreed on which number is right or on how the tower got there in the first place. But that is only the beginning. Its enormous columns preserve a physical record scientists can read, while tribal traditions describe those same grooves through stories older than the United States. Its official name may trace back to a mistranslation. Congress is still fighting over whether that name should change, and every June, climbers face a decision that no law can make for them. Then Hollywood added aliens to the story, creating the identity most people recognize today. Seven mysteries. None requires a conspiracy. And that may be the strangest part. Because the deeper you look at Devil's Tower, the less settled this place becomes. In 1888, geologist Everett Carpenter proposed one of the first serious explanations for Devil's Tower. More than a century later, his answer still has not won. And neither has anyone else's. Geologists broadly agree on one thing. Devil's Tower is igneous rock, formed from magma that cooled and hardened millions of years ago. The real argument begins with what that magma was doing before the tower existed. Carpenter believed it was the hardened neck of an ancient volcano. The surrounding volcano slowly eroded away, leaving only its solid interior behind. There was just one problem. If a volcano once stood here, geologists would expect evidence around it. Ash deposits, lava flows, volcanic debris. That evidence has never been found in the way the theory would require. So in 1907, researchers proposed another explanation. Maybe the magma never reached the surface. Instead, it may have spread underground into a dome-shaped body called a lacolith. That explanation became influential enough to appear on official geological maps. But it has a problem too. A large lacolith should bend the surrounding rock layers upward. Around Devil's Tower, those layers are largely flat. No clear dome, no convincing bulge. Then came a simpler possibility. Maybe the tower is a stalk, a relatively compact mass of hardened magma underground. The National Park Service has treated this as one of the simpler explanations. But simple does not mean proven. Then, in 2015, another theory reopened the argument. Geologist Prokop Zavada and his colleagues proposed that Devil's Tower may be the remains of thick lava emplaced inside an explosive volcanic crater. They used structural comparisons and thermal modeling. The research was peer-reviewed. It still did not settle the question. And the reason may be impossible to fix. The same erosion that exposed Devil's Tower also removed enormous amounts of the landscape that once surrounded it. Whatever structure originally existed above the tower may be gone. The evidence needed to choose between these theories may have disappeared millions of years before scientists arrived. That is the disturbing part. Devil's Tower became visible because its surroundings were erased. And that same process may have erased the answer. But if its original shape cannot be reconstructed with certainty, one thing should be easier to determine. Its age. Instead, Devil's Tower has two. And the difference between them is almost 9 million years. For decades, Devil's Tower had a number attached to it. 40.5 million years. That age came from a 1961 study published in the journal Science. Researchers used potassium argon dating on minerals inside the tower. At the time, it was advanced work. But the measurement came with a margin of error of about 4%. That sounds small. Across 40 million years, it means more than one and a half million years of uncertainty. Still, the number stuck. It appeared in books, exhibits, and public explanations for decades. Then, in 2002, researchers tested the formation again. This time, they used argon-argon dating. It is based on the same radioactive decay system, but it can produce more precise results and help identify contamination or alteration. The new result was not 40.5 million years. It was closer to 49 million, almost 9 million years older. And there was another detail. The nearby Missouri Buttes produced almost the same age. That suggested both formations may have been connected to the same ancient magmatic event. So it sounds like the newer measurement should have replaced the old one. It did not. The 49 million year result was presented in a conference abstract. It was never developed into a full peer-reviewed journal paper carrying the same weight as the 1961 study. That left Devil's Tower in an unusual scientific position. Two legitimate measurements, two very different numbers, and no final institutional correction that completely erased either one. Even National Park Service materials have cited different ages over time. That gap has also been misused. Young Earth creationist groups have pointed to the disagreement as evidence that radiometric dating cannot be trusted. It is not. A disagreement over the precise age of one formation does not invalidate radiometric dating, which has been independently tested across thousands of geological sites. The scientific uncertainty is real. The fringe conclusion is not. But the uncomfortable part remains. Scientists can agree Devil's Tower is tens of millions of years old. They still do not have one universally repeated number for exactly how old. And while those dates differ by almost 9 million years, the tower itself contains another record. It is written directly into the giant vertical columns. And those columns may reveal something the age numbers cannot. Stand close enough to Devil's Tower and the first thing you notice is not its height. It is the pattern. Hundreds of enormous stone columns rise beside one another, almost like something assembled them vertically and then abandoned the structure halfway through. And if your eyes keep trying to turn it into something familiar, you are not alone. But the accepted explanation starts with something completely natural. Cooling rock. As molten rock loses heat, it contracts. Stress builds inside it until fractures begin to spread. Those cracks often meet at angles near 120 degrees, producing columns with several sides. Many become six-sided. Others have four, five, or seven. That process is called columnar jointing. It happens elsewhere. What does not happen elsewhere quite like this is the scale. The National Park Service describes Devil's Tower as the largest example of columnar jointing in the world. Some columns near the base reach several feet across and continue upward for hundreds of feet. But look carefully and another problem appears. The columns do not all point in the same direction. Higher inside the tower, many are nearly vertical. Lower down, they begin to flare outward. On one side, some approach horizontal. That geometry matters because fractures form in response to how heat escapes. In other words, the columns are not decoration. They are a frozen record of cooling. In 2018, researchers took basalt from Iceland and recreated part of this process under controlled laboratory conditions. They heated the rock, then watched what happened as it cooled. The fractures did not form while the basalt was fully molten. They appeared later, after it had solidified inside a surprisingly narrow temperature range. Between roughly 840 and 890 degrees Celsius. Think about that for a moment. A crack forming millions of years ago can preserve information about temperature long after the heat itself is gone. The shape becomes the thermometer. And this is where Devil's Tower starts bothering me more, not less. Science can explain why columnar joints exist. It can reproduce the cracking. It can measure the temperatures. But when you stand beneath something this large, knowing the mechanism does not make the structure look ordinary. It makes you realize how extreme the conditions had to be. An enormous mass of hot rock had to cool slowly enough, consistently enough, and under the right geometry to leave this pattern behind. So here is the question I would ask if I were standing at the base. Does explaining the mechanism actually explain Devil's Tower? Or have we only explained how the cracks formed, while the larger story of what they formed inside is still missing? Because those same vertical grooves were being explained long before laboratories could measure cooling rock. And the older explanation involves something completely different. A bear. Long before geologists measured cooling rates, dated minerals, or argued over volcanic structures, people living around this landscape were already trying to explain the same vertical grooves. And their explanation begins with a bear. More than two dozen tribal nations consider Devil's Tower sacred. Among them are the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Arapaho, Shoshone, and Kiowa. Their traditions are not identical. The names are not identical either. But something repeats. The bear. In Lakota tradition, the place is associated with Mato Tipala, commonly translated as Bear Lodge. The Cheyenne have called it Bear's Lodge. The Crow use Bear's House. The Arapaho use a name translated as Bear's Tipi. Different languages. Different nations. The same animal keeps appearing. And then there is the story. In several versions, children are being chased by an enormous bear. They climb onto a rock for safety. The rock begins to rise beneath them. Higher. And higher. The bear tries to follow. Its claws scrape down the sides of the stone, leaving the deep vertical grooves still visible today. In some versions, the children rise into the sky and become stars associated with the Pleiades. Now look at the tower again. Those enormous lines running from top to bottom are the same feature geologists explain through cooling, contraction, and fracture mechanics. Two completely different systems looked at the same physical structure and asked the same question. Why are those grooves there? One answer came from physics. The other came through oral tradition. And this is where I think the story gets more interesting than simply asking which one is right. Because a scientific explanation for how rock fractures does not erase what that physical feature meant to people living beside it for generations. And an oral tradition does not need to function like a geology paper to preserve the importance of a place. They are answering different kinds of questions. If you have made it this far, and this kind of detail is the reason you watch these investigations, leave a like. Not because the mystery needs exaggeration. Because the real history is already strange enough. And there is one detail here that is difficult to ignore. The people closest to this formation did not call it anything connected to a devil. Their names repeatedly pointed somewhere else. Toward bears. Toward a lodge. Toward a sacred place. So how did millions of people end up learning a completely different name? The answer does not begin millions of years ago. It begins in 1875. With an armed expedition. A translator. And a few words that may have changed the identity of this place for the next century and a half. By 2014, the argument over Devil's Tower was no longer just about history. It had become federal paperwork. Lakota spiritual leader Arvol Looking Horse formally asked the United States government to replace Devil's Tower with Bear Lodge. The request was not symbolic. It went to the federal system responsible for official geographic names. And that is where something unusual happened. Opponents argued that Bear Lodge could not represent every tribal nation connected to the site. That point is technically true. Different nations have different names. But think about the practical result. If no alternative can be accepted because every tribe does not use the exact same words. Then the one name almost none of those traditions created remains in place automatically. Devil's Tower wins by default. Then the fight moved into Congress. Federal naming policy generally avoids deciding a disputed geographic name while related legislation is active. Wyoming lawmakers repeatedly introduced bills to formally preserve Devil's Tower. The bills did not need to become law to matter. Their existence helped keep the administrative process frozen. Then in June of 2024, something changed. A federal advisory committee created to review contested place names examined the case. After years of tribal advocacy, the committee recommended Bear Lodge. For a moment, the century old dispute appeared to have moved closer to an answer. It did not. On January 8th, 2025, Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, joined by Senator John Barrasso, introduced Senate Bill 31. Its language is remarkably simple. The mountain and surrounding area would officially be designated Devil's Tower, not temporarily, not as a nickname, federally. Then came another turn. In February of 2025, the Federal Reconciliation in Place Names Committee itself was terminated. The recommendation had already been made. The committee that made it was gone. And as of 2026, the sign still says Devil's Tower. This is the part I find difficult to dismiss as just bureaucracy. A name suspected of beginning with a mistranslation survived long enough to become tradition. And once a mistake survives for generations, correcting it can start to feel like changing history. So which matters more? The name people have recognized for more than a century? Or the names that were there before the mistake happened? There may not be an answer everyone accepts. But there is something strange about a rock that has barely changed in millions of years, becoming the center of a political fight over two words. And while Washington argues over what people should call this place, another dispute happens directly on the rock itself. Every June, no court order stops it. No fence prevents it. And every climber has to make the decision for themselves. Imagine standing at the base of Devil's Tower in June. Your ropes are ready. The route above you is open. You are legally allowed to climb. And then you see the request asking you not to. That decision has divided people for more than 30 years. For many Native American tribes connected to the tower, June carries particular cultural and spiritual importance. Ceremonies, prayer, and other traditional practices take place around the monument. Some are private. You may never even see them. But above those ceremonies rises one of the most famous climbing destinations in the United States. By the early 1990s, thousands of climbers were coming here. Bolts had been drilled into the rock. Voices carried across the walls. For climbers, this was recreation. For some tribal communities, it was happening on sacred ground. In 1995, after years of discussion involving climbers, tribal representatives, and the National Park Service, officials reached an unusual compromise. During June, visitors would be asked not to climb Devil's Tower. Asked, not ordered. There would be no blanket legal prohibition. And that single distinction eventually took the conflict into federal court. In 1996, climbers and commercial guides sued the government. They argued that encouraging people to avoid climbing because of Native American religious practices crossed a constitutional line between government and religion. The case reached the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. But in 1999, the climbers lost for a reason that almost sounds paradoxical. Because the closure was voluntary, the court concluded they had not suffered the kind of legal injury required to challenge it. Nobody was actually forcing them to stop. They could still climb. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case the following year. So the compromise survived. And it survives today. The National Park Service still asks climbers to stay off the tower during June. Most apparently do. But here is what makes this uncomfortable. There is no invisible wall. No ranger standing beneath every root. A climber can arrive with equipment, look upward, understand why the request exists, and still decide to go. Legally. So put yourself there. You traveled across the country. You may have planned this climb for years. The weather is perfect. Nothing physically blocks you. And somewhere nearby, people regard the same rock face not as a challenge to conquer, but as a place deserving reverence. Would you climb? I am not sure that question has an easy answer. Because Devil's Tower forces two completely legitimate human impulses into the same few acres. The freedom to experience a public place. And the willingness to leave part of it untouched out of respect for someone else. But while people have spent decades fighting over who should climb this rock, Hollywood gave the entire world a completely different reason to stare at its summit. And that final association became so powerful that millions of people now recognize Devil's Tower without knowing its real history. By the 1970s, Devil's Tower already had enough mysteries. Geologists disagreed about how it formed. Tribal nations carried older stories about what the grooves meant. The federal government was still using a name many tribes rejected. Then Hollywood arrived and gave the place an entirely new identity. In 1976, Steven Spielberg's production team was searching for a location for close encounters of the third kind. They chose Devil's Tower for one simple reason. It looked unreal. That silhouette became the visual center of the film's final encounter. And after the movie was released in 1977, millions of people who had never heard of Bear Lodge suddenly recognized the shape. Not as a sacred site. Not as a geological argument. As the place where the aliens landed. And I think that says something interesting about how places become famous. Most people do not meet a landscape through geology. They meet it through a story. Sometimes the story is ancient. Sometimes it comes from a government map. And sometimes it comes from a movie theater. A nearby campground has even projected the film outdoors for decades, with the real tower visible behind the screen. Think about that image. People sitting in the dark, watching a fictional spacecraft descend onto Devil's Tower while the actual formation stands silently behind the movie. The strange part is that there is no scientific evidence connecting Devil's Tower to aliens or unexplained aerial phenomena. None. That association comes from cinema. But once a story becomes powerful enough, it can become almost impossible to separate from the place itself. And maybe that is the final secret. Devil's Tower has never had only one identity. To geologists, it is an unresolved igneous structure. To tribal nations, it is a sacred place carrying traditions older than the United States. To climbers, it is one of the most recognizable rock faces in the country. To politicians, it is a naming dispute. And to millions of movie fans, it is where humanity met something from another world. Same rock. Completely different place, depending on who is looking. There is one reaction to Devil's Tower that keeps appearing whenever photographs of it spread online. People say it looks like a tree. Not a small one. A gigantic tree that was cut down and somehow turned to stone. Once someone says it, the resemblance becomes difficult to unsee. The flat summit looks almost sliced. The vertical columns resemble enormous fibers running down a trunk. Even the broken rocks around the base can make the formation feel strangely organic from a distance. And that raises an uncomfortable question. What if everyone is looking at something obvious that science has somehow missed? There is a problem with that idea. The evidence inside the tower does not behave like petrified wood. Devil's Tower is made of phonolite porphyry. It is crystalline igneous rock. Its minerals and texture are consistent with molten material that cooled and hardened. There are no tree rings. No preserved cellular structure. No bark. No geological evidence of roots beneath it. The National Park Service is unusually direct about another popular question. The tower is not hollow. So scientifically, the giant tree explanation collapses very quickly. But I do not think that makes the reaction meaningless. Because look at the shape again. Human beings are extremely good at recognizing familiar patterns. Faces in clouds. Animals in rocks. Structures where there are only fractures. And Devil's Tower presents one of the strongest visual traps imaginable. A natural process produced something that our brains desperately want to classify as manufactured or biological. That may explain why the tree idea refuses to die. But there is something else worth noticing. Even after you understand the geology, the resemblance remains. Knowing those vertical lines are cooling fractures does not stop them from looking like fibers. Knowing the summit is erosion does not stop it from looking cut. The explanation changes. The image does not. Maybe that is why Devil's Tower produces so many competing stories. It looks familiar enough to invite an answer. But strange enough to make every answer feel incomplete. And if you think the tower looks isolated because nothing else around Wyoming resembles it, there is another detail most photographs leave outside the frame. Devil's Tower is not actually alone. A few miles away stand four formations made from the same unusual rock. And what geologists found beneath that area makes the story considerably bigger. From most famous photographs, Devil's Tower appears completely alone. One impossible column of rock rising from open country. That image is powerful. It is also incomplete. About three and a half miles northwest sit four formations called the Little Missouri Buttes. Most visitors barely notice them. From some angles, trees and terrain hide them. But from the summit of Devil's Tower, all four can be seen. And geologically, they matter. The Little Missouri Buttes are made from the same uncommon rock as Devil's Tower, faunalite porphyry. They even show some columnar jointing of their own. They simply do not have the same dramatic vertical exposure. Some geologists have suggested the Buttes and Devil's Tower may have come from the same larger magmatic event. That possibility becomes more interesting when you look underground. A United States Geological Survey investigation described a well-drilled near Missouri Buttes that encountered rock similar to both formations roughly 1,400 feet beneath the surface. Researchers interpreted that buried rock as evidence of an intrusive body below the sedimentary layers. That does not prove a gigantic hidden structure connects everything underground. And it definitely does not prove routes, tunnels, or anything artificial. But it does change the scale of the question. Because the tower we photographed today may represent only one exposed expression of a much larger episode of magma moving beneath this region. Most of that story could still be buried or already erased. Think back to the first secret. Erosion removed the softer layers and exposed Devil's Tower. But erosion did not expose everything equally. At one location, it revealed hundreds of feet of spectacular columns. A few miles away, similar rock remains in smaller Buttes. And elsewhere, related igneous material may still sit beneath thousands of feet of sediment. So maybe the strangest mistake we make when looking at Devil's Tower is assuming the visible tower is the entire object. It may not be. It may simply be the piece geology happened to uncover for us. Which leaves one final question. If erosion exposed this much, what has it not exposed yet? Nine secrets later, I think Devil's Tower becomes stranger for a very simple reason. Every answer changes the question. Explain the columns, and you still have to explain the body they formed inside. Date the rock, and two numbers remain. Explain the name, and you inherit a political fight. Look beyond the tower, and the geology continues underground and several miles away. Maybe that is why this place refuses to feel finished. Not because someone is hiding one enormous secret. Because different pieces of the story are still incomplete. So I want your answer to one question. What is the weakest explanation we covered? The formation? The age? The giant tree resemblance? The name? Or what may still be buried beneath the surrounding landscape? Leave your answer in the comments, and tell me why. If this investigation gave you something you had never heard before, leave a like and subscribe. The next mystery starts somewhere else.