The Devil and Deadwood

Gillette, Wyoming -- They call Wyoming, “Wonderful Wyoming” but they miss an adjective in this description. It should be “Wonderful, Windy Wyoming” because around here high atmospheric pressure seems to be always trying to push low pressure out of the way, at high velocity.

This makes motorbiking more like sailing than motorbiking. There’s nothing like leaning a bike into a curve when there is no curve, just the pressure from a 60 mile-an-hour gale. But, heck, that just makes the trip more interesting, yes?

And the trip is interesting. There are two spots nearby Gillette that are worth the journey. The first is Devil’s Tower, the iconic, volcanic, geologic feature that was burned forever into the American consciousness when Richard Dryfuss made a model of the mountain out of mashed potatoes at the beginning of “Close Encounters of the First Kind’’ and then spent the rest of the movie with half a sunburned face inexplicably moved to visit the place – only to then take a trip on a UFO to who knows where.

All of that wacky stuff is fiction, of course, but the tower is very real. You get the first glimpse of it from about 16 miles away, but the full flower of the tower is held in secret until you are up upon it. And it is big. Almost 1,300 feet tall it looms above another icon of America, the trading post.

That’s right, the Devil’s Tower trading post dominates the scenery up close. Inside, not surprisingly, they sell every kind of DT kitsch that you would expect, but not a lot of stuff in the extra-terrestrial motif, which can only mean that the Spielberg movie is now very old.

Why is it called the Devil’s Tower? Well back in 1875 when the United States was trying to figure out a way out of the Treaty of Laramie – a treaty that basically gave the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Sioux even though it was really theirs already – Col. Richard Irving Dodge met with the Sioux who tried to explain the importance of the geologic feature, but Col. Dodge’s translator goofed, so the Native American’s description “Bear’s Lodge” was thought to mean “Bad God’s Tower” and the name has stuck.

A bit further down the road is the old west town of Deadwood, just across the border in South Dakota. This place, too, has connections to that Laramie Treaty the U.S. was trying to break, and why? Well, gold, of course.

Deadwood is also a place with a Mass Media connection. There’s an HBO series running with the same name as the town that’s been something of a controversy mainly because the show’s characters use the F-Word so much. Again with the fiction.

Deadwood is also a real place, though, and also dates to 1875 and the Black Hills gold rush. Today’s Deadwood is a Disneyfied Las Vegas in the mountains. The town motto should be “A slot machine for every tourist and a tourise for every slot machine.”

The ambiance is old west, but seems forced, which is too bad. The place has real history that includes famous westward expansionists like George Custer, Phillip Sheridan, and even more famous names like Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane.

The ride from Gillette to Devil’s Tower and beyond to Deadwood is about 230 miles, round trip, and well worth it, even though a major portion of the journey is spend at 80 miles per hour on Interstate 90, tilted into 60 mile per hour headwinds. Ah, Wonderful.