Devils TowerSacred to native-American tribes, this stunning feature in Wyoming has a rich history in

Devils TowerSacred to native-American tribes, this stunning feature in Wyoming has a rich history in folklore.The tribes of the Kiowa and Lakota for example, tell a story of a group of girls attempting to escape the local bears whilst out playing. Once cornered by the bears, the girls climbed on to nearby rocks and prayed to the ‘Great Spirit’ for help. In answer to their prayers, the rocks beneath them rose from the ground towards the sky, beyond the reach of the bears. In their attempts to climb the rock and catch the girls, the bears failed, scouring claw marks in to the sides (which can be identified today as columnar jointing). Once the girls had ascended to the sky, they could be seen forever more as the Pleiades star constellation.More recent hypotheses identify the tower as an igneous intrusion, however its exact method of formation is disputed. One popular theory states that the tower is the volcanic plug of an extinct volcano, exposed today by the preferential erosion of softer volcanic deposits around it. However, there is no evidence of extrusive volcanic material in the surrounding stratigraphy, so its origin as a laccolith is favoured.A laccolith forms by the intrusion of magma in to sedimentary beds without reaching the surface, forming a anticlinal bulge in the sediments. In this case, the hosting rocks have been eroded away over the past 2 million years, exposing the intrusion at the surface complete with well-defined columnar jointing formed during its cooling.Today, the site receives 400,000 visitors annually, with 1% of those being climbers attempting to scale at least some of its 386m (1267ft.) height.-WAVImage Credit: m01229 (http://bit.ly/1r8RTla)Sources:http://1.usa.gov/1mrE9fthttp://bit.ly/1Y8vRv9http://bit.ly/1OUSV9A -- source link

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