On July 4th, 1893, about a thousand people lined the banks of the Belle Fourche River in Wyoming and watched a rancher named William Rogers start climbing Devil’s Tower on a ladder of wooden pegs hammered into the rock. The tower rose 867 feet from its base, and the handbills that brought those people out promised that no human being had ever stood on top of it. The pegs ran up a single crack for about 350 feet. Above the last peg there was no ladder at all, just a grassy ledge and bare rock and the rest of the climb.
The speeches had begun at nine that morning. By noon, everyone on that riverbank would know whether the pegs held. Two ranchers built that ladder, and one small fact decided which of them swung the hammer. One of them was left-handed.
Forty-eight years later, a second crowd gathered at the foot of the same rock. That time they were watching a man stuck on the summit, and the climbers who finally went up to bring him down carried wooden pegs of their own. Eighteen years before that Fourth of July, a government survey party came through this corner of Wyoming, and one of its geologists later wrote that the summit of that rock could not be reached. His name was Henry Newton.
He called the tower “a great remarkable obelisk,” and then he wrote this: “Its summit is so entirely inaccessible that the energetic explorer to whom the ascent of an ordinarily difficult crag is but a pleasant pastime, standing at its base could only look upward in despair of ever planting his feet on the top. ” The officer commanding the soldiers who escorted that survey was Colonel Richard Dodge, and he is the man usually credited with the name. In a book he published the next year, Dodge wrote that the Indians called the shaft “the bad god’s tower” and that his surveyors had adopted that name with proper modification. The Park Service says a mistranslation is suspected, that the men may have confused the words for bear and bad god, because the older name was Bear Lodge.
In Lakota it is Mato Tipila. The Arapaho called it Bear’s Tipi. Other translations come out as Grey Horn Butte and Tree Rock, and the Park Service counts more than two dozen tribes with ties to the place, among them the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Arapaho, Shoshone, and Kiowa. One of the sacred narratives, told by an Arapaho man named Sherman Sage and written down in 1932, explains the long grooves on the columns as scratches left by a bear.
In 1890, Rogers told his brother-in-law there had to be some way to get to the top of that tower. Then he put a deadline on it: “I’ll be on top of the tower before three years. ” He was talking about 1893. Rogers had come into Wyoming in the early 1880s after mining in the Black Hills.
He hauled freight with a team and wagon, went into cattle, married a woman named Linnie, and ended up in Bear Lodge Canyon a few miles north of the tower. His sister remembered him as “a big raw boned man who feared neither man nor the devil. ” By the spring of 1893 he had a partner, a rancher named Willard Ripley, whose place sat on the Belle Fourche about two miles north of the rock, and Ripley’s father was pushing both of them to try. The Park Service’s history is plain about why they tried it that year.
There was a drought, times were lean, and the two families figured money could be made from a climb. The climb itself would be free to watch. The money would come from the food stands and the dance the families planned to run at the foot of the rock. The handbill even took a swing at the World’s Fair, telling people the Fourth of July would be better spent at Devil’s Tower.
Their first idea had nothing to do with a ladder. They built a big kite. The plan was to fly it over the top, drag a string across the summit, use the string to pull over a heavier cord, and use the cord to pull over a rope. They worked that kite for about three weeks.
Then it lodged in a crevice on the side of the rock and wouldn’t come loose. While they were working it free, they got a good look at what it was stuck in. It was a crack, a long vertical one running between two of the tower’s columns, and it looked as though it went all the way up to some broken ledges about two-thirds of the way to the top. If they could get up that crack to those ledges, they figured they could climb the rest on their own.
Devil’s Tower is made of a hard igneous rock called phonolite porphyry, and hundreds of parallel cracks split it into big six-sided columns. Newell Joyner, the monument’s custodian from 1932 to 1947, later described the problem. Everywhere else, he said, the columns run 550 to 600 feet up to the rim. On the southeast corner, a sloping bench cuts them down to about 300.
And that corner, in his words, was about the only place on the whole tower where they found a continuous open vertical crack between two columns for their full height. Of all the cracks on that rock, the kite had caught in about the only one a ladder could follow the whole way up. So they built the ladder. Ripley’s father and Rogers cut oak, ash, and willow trees and sawed them into pegs twenty-four to thirty inches long and about three inches thick, sharpened on one end.
They hauled the pegs by wagon to the foot of the tower, carried them up the slope of broken rock at its base, and Ripley rigged a rope and pulley to lift them up the side of the column. Picture an ordinary wooden ladder, and then take away one of its two side rails. On Devil’s Tower, the crack did the job of the missing rail: it gripped one end of every rung. The other rail was still there, a long wooden strip fastened to the outer end of every peg, so the pegs braced each other and the whole thing stiffened as it grew.
Every peg got hammered into that crack by a man standing on the peg below it. This is where the left hand comes in. The pegs had to be driven in from the left. The column on the left side of the crack was flat, and the rock on the right bulged out.
Ripley had come to Crook County as a fifteen-year-old in 1880, and years later he would be president of the Hulett State Bank. That summer he was the man on the peg. He stood on one stake, leaned his right shoulder and hip against the rock, and swung the hammer with his left arm because he was left-handed. Joyner pointed out something else about that ladder.
Near the bottom, the pegs were heavy and long and set close together. Near the top, all three of those things were reversed: they got lighter, shorter, and farther apart. Nobody wrote down why. Every one of them had to come up that rope first.
Higher up, the crack also changed its angle, and anyone going up had to pass between two pegs and finish with the rock on the left side instead of the right. The crack never reached the summit. It ended at a grassy sloping ledge that is called the Meadows today, about 150 feet below the top. Getting from the ladder onto that ledge took a bit of a leap.
After that it was a scramble. The federal file that put this ladder on the National Register says building it was quite possibly more dangerous than climbing it. Ripley’s wife, Dolly, cooked for the men while they camped at the foot of the tower, and years later she remembered the strain: “Every day when they went to work, I didn’t know whether they would all come back at night or not, but they always did. ”
The last peg went in around June 28th or 29th.
Because Ripley had been the one driving them, he was the first of the two to climb the finished ladder and the first to reach the top. Days before the crowd arrived, he came back down and told Dolly there was nothing up there but a little soil and some sagebrush. While Ripley finished the ladder, Rogers worked on bringing in the crowd. He also ordered a flag.
White muslin was bought at the Abe Frank store in Sundance. Mrs. James Thains sewed it up out of yard-wide pieces into a flag twelve feet long and seven feet wide, and a Sundance artist named Truman Fox painted on the red stripes and the blue field around forty-four stars that had been marked out on the cloth. Then came the handbill.
It called Devil’s Tower “one of the greatest natural wonders in the United States,” a perpendicular column of rock that no human being had ever stepped upon, and it promised that on the Fourth, Old Glory would be flung to the breeze from the top by Rogers himself. It promised plenty to eat and drink, lots of hay and grain for the horses, and dancing day and night, and it called the climb “the rarest sight of a lifetime. ” That May, the announcement was copied as far away as the Evening World in New York and the Evening Star in Washington. For days before the Fourth, people were on the move.
Some came from Rapid City, South Dakota, 125 miles away, a round trip of at least a week. A longtime Hulett resident told a historian in the 1950s that back in the 1890s you had to ford the Belle Fourche River seven times just to reach the tower. The stage from Deadwood rolled in with a full load of passengers. By the evening of July 3rd, seven or eight hundred people were already camped on the north side of the tower and along the Belle Fourche, and one woman had brought her feather bed.
It rained hard that night. The morning of the Fourth came up clear and sunny, and at nine o’clock two ministers stood up in front of that crowd to speak and pray, and somebody handed Rogers a costume. It was an Uncle Sam suit, a white jacket with a red emblem and blue pants furnished by a merchant in Deadwood. A choir sang a few songs.
A young boy recited a piece called “America. ” Then Rogers took the flag and started up the rock. People down on the river flat trained their scopes on the tower, and what they saw was a man in red, white, and blue working his way up that line of pegs with a flag in tow. The records don’t agree on how long the climb took him.
The 1956 history said he climbed like a squirrel and made it in about thirty minutes. Either way, by noon he was on the summit, 867 feet above the base of the tower, where a twelve-foot flagpole had gone up in sections. He raised the flag, and the cheering carried up from below. A week later, the Cheyenne Daily Sun wrote that it was a wonder nobody in that crowd had fainted.
At about two in the afternoon, the wind came up. Fox, the man who had painted the flag, said he could hear it snapping from where he stood at the base. Then it tore loose. A rancher named Al Storz, who played his fiddle at the dance that night, told it this way: “It wasn’t long until the flag was torn off the pole and came whirling down.
I can see it to this day. ” The story goes that the flag was cut into pieces right there at the foot of the tower and sold, fifty cents for a star and a quarter for a scrap of stripe. The Park Service’s history tells it that way, and so does the one from 1956. But the Park Service’s own page about the ladder says that long-held belief was never substantiated and that local historians have never located a single piece.
The food stands sold out. Kids pitched horseshoes, fiddle and organ music played while Rogers made his way back down, and the crowd danced all night. He wasn’t the only one who went up the pegs that day. The most reliable story in the Park Service’s history has five boys on top of the tower, the youngest of them twelve years old.
The 2023 study names one boy, Cyril Miller, who walked over from Spearfish, South Dakota, climbed the tower after Rogers, and then went the sixty miles back home. The Sundance paper ran it under the headline “He Accomplished the Feat” and called the crowd one of the largest ever assembled in the county. The papers didn’t agree on how big that crowd was, with reports running anywhere from 800 to 1,500 people, and the 1956 history settles on about a thousand as the conservative figure. Forty-one years later, Storz put it in perspective: “That would be just a small crowd nowadays, but it was a very big one at that time.
The country was very thinly settled then, and some folks traveled for two and three days to get there. ”
The ladder didn’t come down when the crowd went home, and over the next thirteen years, three more stories played out on that crack. The first belongs to Linnie Rogers. On the Fourth of July, 1895, two years after her husband’s climb, she went up the same ladder.
She had practiced on it with him for a few days beforehand, and then she made the climb alone in knee-high leather boots and a navy blue bloomer suit with wide sleeves. She carried a flag of her own, planted it in the summit meadow, and stayed on top about twenty minutes. She is the first woman known to have reached the top of Devil’s Tower. The next woman on record didn’t stand up there for fifty-three years, and she needed ropes to do it.
The second story is about that ladder working a little too well. Some years after Linnie’s climb, Ripley was out riding near the tower with a man named Pete Hazelbacker when the two of them heard voices. The voices were coming from the top of the rock. Three men had gone up the ladder, and now they couldn’t find their way back down to the Meadows and the top of the pegs.
Ripley and Hazelbacker climbed up after them and guided all three down. Not long after that, Rogers destroyed the lower part of the ladder so nobody else could climb up and get stuck. The man who had built a whole Fourth of July around those pegs was the one who cut the bottom out of them. The third story began on July 22nd, 1906, when a twenty-six-year-old engineer for the Homestake Mining Company named Arthur Job from Lead, South Dakota, pulled up to the tower with a group of friends in a rented team and covered wagon.
They were paying a dollar a day for the team and fifty cents a day for the wagon. Walking around the base, they found the old ladder. Job sent the girl who would later become his wife back to camp for the camera, and he started up so she could take his picture on top. The first fifteen feet of the ladder had been burned away, so Job took off his shoes and climbed that stretch with his bare feet in the cracks of the rock.
He started up about 10:15 in the morning. The pegs above were loose, and he went carefully. He made the top, walked around the summit, and picked up a set of cactus spines in his bare feet for his trouble. Coming down, he couldn’t find the ladder.
He hadn’t marked the crack, and he made several false starts before he found the ledge where the top of the pegs was. Near the top of the ladder there were about half a dozen empty beer bottles. He put his name and address and a note inside one of them and left it there. He never heard a word back.
He was on the ground again around 1:30 in the afternoon, carrying rock samples and a chip off that old flagpole, and the chip ended up in the Adams Museum in Deadwood. The Deadwood and Lead papers gave him credit for the second climb of the tower. Job didn’t believe it. Those bottles told him other people had been up that ladder since 1893.
Two months after Job came down, on September 24th, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Devil’s Tower the first national monument in the country. The historian who wrote the 1956 history went through several Wyoming newspapers from that September looking for the news. He couldn’t find a single mention of it. By 1941, the bottom hundred feet of that ladder had been gone for years, and the tower had a custodian, the same Joyner whose notes explained how the ladder was built.
On October 1st, Joyner got word of what was happening. At about a quarter to eight in the morning, he could make out a man on the summit. His name was George Hopkins. He was a professional parachutist from Texas who had come up to Rapid City for an air show, and he held records for the most parachute jumps on the books: 2,347 of them, including a jump from 26,400 feet two weeks earlier.
Earl Brockelsby, who owned Reptile Gardens, had bet him fifty dollars he couldn’t land on top of Devil’s Tower. The plan was for Hopkins to stay up there about an hour and a half, just long enough for a Rapid City radio station to put the story on the air. He jumped from 800 feet above the summit, spilled some air out of his chute to hit the mark, and came down on top. He won the bet.
His pilot, Joe Quinn, came back around and dropped a thousand feet of rope for the trip down. Hopkins was supposed to haul up a sharpened axle, a pulley, and a sledgehammer, drive the axle into the summit, tie off the rope, and lower himself over the side. The rope slid off the top of the tower and landed on a ledge below him, out of reach. The hour and a half turned into half a day, then into two days, and the story went to front pages across the country.
Brockelsby put it this way: “This started out as a publicity stunt, but it backfired and then wildfired. I’m worried about George. ” Quinn flew on and landed at the Spearfish airport, where he told a local pilot, “There’s a boy on Devil’s Tower. ” That pilot was Clyde Ice.
Ice said later, “I didn’t believe him until I flew over the rock and saw Hopkins there. ” From then on, Ice was the man’s lifeline. The air around the tower threw up sudden updrafts, so when Ice came in with a second rope and a grappling hook, he cut his engine, glided in close to the rock while his partner threw the rope out, and started the motor again. Just before dark he came back and dropped blankets, food, a tarp, and a note promising they’d get Hopkins off the next day.
A storm moved in that night, and the temperature dropped. A rancher named John Woods was watching from the base. A fog cloud moved in and just cut Hopkins off from sight. “Sure would have made me feel lonesome up there,” Woods said.
Joyner found out two things that settled whether Hopkins could get himself down. Hopkins didn’t know how to tie rope hitches around his body, and he had planned to go down that rope hand over hand. And the notes he dropped from the top said his arms and legs felt weak. Joyner decided Hopkins would not be climbing down alone.
He later wrote that Hopkins would have tried any way off that rock the Park Service permitted, even one that might have cost him his life, rather than put anyone else in danger. The next day, Ice dropped a flying suit lined with bare skin, a megaphone, and a medium-rare T-bone steak. By that afternoon, more than a thousand sightseers, photographers, and reporters had gathered at the base of the tower, and the papers were calling him “Devil’s Tower George. ” Forty-eight years after the ranchers’ picnic, there was a crowd on the ground below that rock again, looking up.
Joyner kept order down there with help from the Wyoming Highway Patrol, Boy Scouts, and rangers from other parks, and over the whole week he put the number of visitors at about 7,000. Up on the summit, Hopkins was settling in. The bottle of whiskey dropped to him the first day stayed untouched. When Joyner wanted to drop him some traps to collect the packrats, mice, and chipmunks that lived up there, Hopkins said he’d hate to trap them.
He’d been feeding them, and by then they were his pets. The Goodyear company offered its blimp. The Navy offered a helicopter. The blimp would have needed about five days to get there, and Goodyear wanted it to be the only rescue attempt, so the Park Service passed on it.
That left climbers. A ranger from Rocky Mountain National Park named Ernest Field and a Colorado climbing guide named Warren Gorrell weighed the only two routes up the tower that Field thought were feasible. Field wrote that the first one, a crack climbed in 1937, was far beyond their ability, so they tried the second. About halfway up the tower, that route runs into a sixty-foot vertical pitch, and they couldn’t get up it.
They fixed a rope and came back down. Every plan kept pointing at one man. The climber who had led that second route up the tower in 1938 was a college student at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, and he had already sent a wire to the monument offering to help. But storms across the Midwest were grounding flights.
Hopkins was still sitting on top of the rock with no way down, and before anyone could reach him, a sleet storm would glaze the whole tower in ice. The student was Jack Durrance. He was born in Florida and grew up in Vermont and Bavaria, and at Dartmouth he was a premed student who skied and climbed. In September of 1938, he and a climbing partner named Harrison Butterworth spent most of an afternoon working their way around the base of the tower, looking for a line they could climb.
The next morning they started up, and a storm broke over them and soaked their ropes. They rappelled off, spent the night in the basement of the ranger station drying those ropes, and at daybreak they went back. That second try put them on top by a route climbers still call the Durrance route, the classic climb on the tower. Butterworth wrote later that they went because of a climb made the summer before, which he said plainly invited an attempt to duplicate it.
That climb happened on June 28th, 1937. A German-born climber from New York named Fritz Wiessner, who had climbed in the Alps as a boy, came to Devil’s Tower with two partners from the American Alpine Club, and the three of them made the first climb of the tower without the ladder. They started across the broken rock at the base at 6:30 in the morning. By 11:18 they were on the summit.
Wiessner led the whole way. One of his partners, Lawrence Coveney, described the moment they reached the overhanging ledge: “Wiessner looked over the crack when we got to the overhanging ledge and said, ‘I think it goes. ’ I wasn’t so sure, but Wiessner led us up in as magnificent a piece of mountain climbing as I have ever seen. ” They used exactly one piton, a small iron pin with an eye on one end, and Wiessner said afterward he wished he hadn’t used that one.
He also said of the route: “It is an extremely difficult climb for 200 feet and to one who does not know mountain climbing it would be practically impossible to reach the top. ” Joyner had asked them to bring down samples from the summit. They came back with tufts of grass, sagebrush, a cactus in bloom, ferns, some small rocks, and a Mormon cricket. They also reported that the only evidence anyone else had ever climbed the tower was the old flagstaff Ripley and Rogers had carried up in sections for that Fourth of July.
Forty-four years later, the pole was still up there. When the three of them got back to the base, Joyner met them with water. One of the people there to congratulate them was Dolly, the widow of the man who had built the ladder. She had married again, to a man who worked at the monument.
What those climbers did was a different kind of climbing from anything Ripley and Rogers had tried. On the stake ladder, the wood did the holding. You stood on the pegs and climbed them like the rungs they were. The climbers of the 1930s tied themselves together and moved one at a time.
While one man climbed, the others fed his rope out from a secure spot, ready to hold him if he fell. That is called belaying. The rope was there to catch a fall, and nobody pulled himself up on it. Wiessner’s party carried safety ropes of Italian hemp, tested to a ton and a half, and wore low canvas shoes with heavy hemp soles so they could feel the cracks with their feet.
The pitons went into the rock as anchors in case of a fall. To come down, a climber slid down a rope fastened above him, which is called rappelling. That is the method the rescue needed, and the men at the base got to work on the hard part before Durrance even arrived. At that sixty-foot pitch halfway up, they secured a thirty-foot wooden extension ladder to the tower to shorten it and save him time.
The monument’s mechanic, Frank Hepler, made up heavy iron spikes for the cracks that were too wide and deep for an ordinary piton. He was the man Dolly had married. So in October of 1941, a wooden ladder went back up the side of Devil’s Tower, and the man making iron spikes for the job was married to the widow of the rancher who had hammered in the first one. Two more climbers from the Grand Teton country, Paul Petzoldt and Harold Rapp, pulled in with snow on their car, and Rapp remembered what they found: “When we got to Devil’s Tower, a sleet storm had gone through the area.
The tower was nothing but a sheet of glass. ” Durrance and another Dartmouth student flew as far as Chicago. Storms had canceled every flight out, so they caught a train to Denver, picked up two friends there, and drove the rest of the way. They pulled into the monument around midnight on Sunday, October 5th, in a line of police and highway patrol cars with the sirens going.
At 7:30 Monday morning, Durrance took the lead. Eight climbers went up on three ropes. The morning was cold and damp. Durrance climbed facing the wall, using friction holds on the sloping faces of the columns, and as he went he hammered wooden pegs and metal pitons into the rock in case they had to lower Hopkins down the side.
There it was again: a man hammering wooden pegs into that rock with a crowd watching from below. By a quarter to four that afternoon, all eight were on the summit with Hopkins, eating a lunch Joyner’s wife had made for them. Ernest Field wrote, “We all had the impression of being on an island in the sky. The top resembles an acre and a half of any typical Wyoming prairie with a few rocks thrown in.
It is covered with sagebrush, grass, and cactus plants. ” Ripley had said nearly the same thing back in 1893 in fewer words. Field said Hopkins seemed entirely nonchalant and not a bit worse for wear, and he had been dropped about enough food to outfit a country store. At a quarter to five they started down in a series of rappels.
Hopkins had no climbing experience at all, and the rescuers later praised how fast he picked up rappelling. The last part of the descent happened in the dark, under floodlights from a Denver radio station’s truck and the spotlights of two highway patrol cars. Joyner wrote down what it looked like from the ground: “The sudden appearance, as from nowhere, of a climber sliding down the rope into the beam of the spotlight, and the appearance and constant murmur of the crowd gathered around several large warming fires. ” Every one of them was on the ground by 8:20 that night.
Hopkins had been on top of Devil’s Tower for six days. People watching from a distance called Hopkins cocky. Joyner, who had spent that week dealing with him, wrote, “I never once saw anything which indicated cockiness. ” Brockelsby paid for the whole rescue, about $2,000.
The two men who built the original ladder went very different ways after it. Rogers’s life came apart. The Park Service’s history records a series of head injuries over the next ten years, and he lost business and property along the way. In November of 1897, he and Linnie headed west looking for work, and for a while he guided hunters in the Jackson Hole country.
Somewhere in those years he was thrown while hauling a load of poles and landed on his head. In December of 1903 he was admitted to the Wyoming State Hospital in Evanston, and he died there in February of 1904, a little over ten years after he stood on top of the tower in that Uncle Sam suit. He is buried in Spearfish, South Dakota. His old partner from the freight-hauling days, Wayne Morris, said Rogers was “a fine man.
He was always a gentleman. ” Then Morris added this: “I have always wondered how he came to get the idea of climbing the tower as he wasn’t the kind to be doing daredevil things. ” Ripley did well. He and Dolly raised four sons, and their holdings grew for years after the climb.
He died in 1931. The 2023 study notes that guidebook writers and climbing historians have treated that first ascent as a stunt, and in one sense it was, since it was put on to sell food and a dance. But the stunt part took a single morning. The ladder under it took weeks of a man standing on a peg and swinging a hammer left-handed.
The ladder had a hard life of its own. The same study estimates that somewhere between twenty-five and fifty people climbed the upper part of it after Rogers. The bottom section was burned, rebuilt, torn down, and put back more than once. For a while there was a plan to replace it with something permanent.
In February of 1910, Wyoming’s congressman Frank Mondell introduced a bill for money to build an iron stairway from the foot of Devil’s Tower to the summit. It went to committee and never came back out. He introduced the same bill again in 1911 and again in 1913, and both died the same way. The ladder’s last climber was a professional.
On September 11th, 1927, a stunt climber billed as Babe White, the Human Fly, came to the tower. Earlier that year he had climbed the Woolworth Building in New York City, the tallest building in the world at the time. White believed there was no way up Devil’s Tower except the old ladder, so he spent a couple of days repairing it before he went. Reportedly about 500 people came out to watch.
He climbed the pegs with his rope and gear, crossed the Meadows, went onto the top, stepped to the edge, and waved down at the crowd. Coming down, he tied his rope off to something solid, lowered himself as far as it reached, found his footing, jerked the rope loose, and did it all again. That is the last time anyone on record climbed Devil’s Tower on the ranchers’ ladder. A photograph taken in December of 1932 shows nearly all of the outside rail already gone.
During the 1930s, the Park Service removed the bottom hundred feet of the ladder so nobody could use it again. What replaced the ladder was the kind of climbing Wiessner and Durrance brought, with ropes and anchors in the cracks. The Park Service has kept a record of those climbs since 1937, and registering is the law for anyone going above the boulder field. As climbing grew, the older meaning of the rock came back into the story.
American Indian people raised concerns about recreational climbing at the tower, and some see climbing it as a desecration of a sacred site. Many, though not all, of their ceremonies take place in June around the summer solstice. In 1995, the Park Service issued a climbing plan worked out with climbers and tribal representatives, and it asked climbers to stay off the tower for the month of June. That request is voluntary, and the same study says voluntary is what the indigenous representatives preferred, because respect mattered more to them than enforcement.
One tribal member put it like this: “If someone chooses not to climb, the respect comes from their heart. ” The Park Service says June climbing has dropped by an average of 85 percent. The same study reads the Uncle Sam suit and the flag on the summit as a political statement, one of the ways Americans expressed their claim over the Black Hills. The newspapers of 1893 wrote it up as a hometown triumph.
By 1972, what was left of the ladder up there was in bad shape. That June, two park rangers, Terry Rypka and Bruce Bright, climbed the tower to look the old ladder over, and they decided they could save the top of it. They would reset the old pegs, replace and move a few, and fasten a new wooden rail along the outer ends where the original strip had run. On July 3rd, the superintendent brought them lumber, nails, a hand drill, a sledgehammer, wire, and pliers.
They loaded all of it with two ropes and their climbing hardware into a litter, pulled it to the bottom of the slope of broken rock, and carried the gear up to the base of the ladder crack themselves. On July 9th, the work started in earnest. Rypka tightened, replaced, and moved stakes while Bright belayed him, and a third ranger, Roger Holtof, sent tools and boards up on a pulley. The next day, Holtof fastened the new rail to the pegs with bailing wire the way the old rail looked like it had been tied.
Before they quit for the day, they climbed all the way to the top of the tower and came back down the six-hundred-foot pulley rope. Rypka wrote up the job: “When we inspected the old ladder before the project, I felt that it was in such poor condition that it would have essentially disappeared in another couple of years. ” He closed the report with this: “When the new 1×4 is weathered and colored to match the old wood, it should be almost an exact replica of what was placed there in 1893. ” It was never part of a park master plan.
The superintendent at the time, Homer Robinson, said years later, “We just looked at this as a maintenance issue. ” Those rangers used pitons to work their way up beside the ladder, and in the process they put up a new climbing route called Carpenter’s Caper. Today it is the only named route on the tower that nobody is allowed to climb, because it runs too close to a historic structure. How much of the ladder did they save?
The Park Service’s history says the top forty feet. The National Register file says about 170. The paperwork gives both. On July 24th, 2000, the ladder was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
It is one of the few climbing sites on the whole register, and the best known of the others is Camp 4 in Yosemite. When the Park Service took stock of it in a stewardship report in 2019, it rated the ladder in poor condition and still deteriorating, last maintained in 1972, with a second restoration in planning. Two of the original wooden stakes from that ladder have been on loan from the park to the Hulett Museum and Art Gallery in the little town nine miles north of the monument, and the chip Job brought down from the flagpole in 1906 went to the Adams Museum in Deadwood. If you want to see the ladder itself, you have to work for it.
It is on the southeast face, and next to the size of that rock it is small. The National Register file says it is very hard to pick out in photographs and that visitors usually need a telescope to find it. The upper part can be seen from an informational sign below it. Most people get to the tower off Interstate 90, taking US Highway 14 from Sundance at exit 185 or from Moorcroft at exit 153 to a place called Devil’s Tower Junction, six miles south of the rock, and then Wyoming Highway 24 the rest of the way in.
From the visitor center, the paved Tower Trail makes a loop of about a mile and a third around the base. As you walk that trail, you will see pieces of cloth and small bundles tied to the trees. Those are prayer cloths, and they mark the connection many tribes still have with this rock. The Park Service asks you not to touch them or move them, and some consider it disrespectful to photograph them.
In June, the park also asks everyone to stay off the tower and not to scramble on the rocks inside that trail loop. The rest of the year, the climbers come. The Park Service puts the number at about 4,500 climbers a year, and the park’s own newspaper says a technical climb to the summit averages five to eight hours, with times running anywhere from eighteen minutes to sixteen hours. In October of 2024, a team of climbers carried a seismometer to the summit under a Park Service permit and left it running overnight.
The results were published this year, and they show the whole tower swaying back and forth at about once a second, set in motion by the wind and by the faint vibration of the earth itself. The biggest movement they measured at the summit was about half a micrometer, which is half of one millionth of a meter. So the pegs still set in that crack are fastened to a rock that is moving all the time by less than a millionth of a meter. On July 4th, 1893, about a thousand people stood on the riverbank below that rock and watched to see whether a line of wooden pegs would hold a man.
More than a century later, people still stand below that rock and look up at the same crack, hunting for those pegs, and some of the stakes those two ranchers drove into it are still holding.
