You may remember the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when Richard Dreyfuss fills his living room with dirt and garbage to sculpt a replica of Devils Tower. Later in the movie, the tower becomes the landing platform for alien spaceships.

But it had otherworldly connections centuries before that.

Many Plains Indian tribes gave the tower mystical significance. Most of their stories revolve around children being chased by a giant bear.

They climb atop a rock, and to save the children, the gods make the rock rise from the prairie. The angry bear scratches its claws on the tower, creating its signature fluted sides.

This legend gave rise to the Crow, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne name for the tower: Bear Lodge.

Geologists tell a different story:

The tower began as a shaft of hot magma that formed in sedimentary layers near the surface. The magma slowly cooled underground around 40 million years ago, forming the columns on its outer surface. Eventually the sediments around it eroded away, exposing the tower, which rises more than 800 ft above the plains!

Today, the tower’s long cracks and columns make it one of the world’s foremost rock-climbing sites—except during the month of June, when climbers respect Native American traditions and leave the tower to their ceremonies.

One October long ago, I tried climbing it myself. We got within a hundred feet of the top before snow turned us back. Perhaps the sacred bear didn’t want us in his lodge that day.