On July 4th, 1893, about a thousand people gathered along the Belle Fourche River in Wyoming to watch rancher William Rogers climb Devils Tower on a ladder of wooden pegs hammered into a crack in the rock. The tower rises 867 feet from its base, and the handbills promoting the event 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 grassy ledges, bare rock, and the rest of the climb.
Eighteen years earlier, a government survey party passed through the area, and its geologist, Henry Newton, declared the summit could not be reached. He called the tower a great remarkable obelisk and wrote that even an energetic explorer who enjoyed climbing difficult crags would stand at its base and look upward in despair. The officer commanding the soldiers on that survey, Colonel Richard Dodge, is usually credited with naming the tower, writing that the Indians called it the bad god’s tower. The Park Service suspects that was a mistranslation, and that the men may have confused the words for bear and bad god, because the older name was Bear Lodge.
In 1890, Rogers told his brother-in-law there had to be some way to get to the top, and he set a deadline. He said he would be on top of the tower before three years were out. By the spring of 1893, he had a partner, rancher Willard Ripley, whose father pushed both men to try. The Park Service is plain about why they attempted it that year: there was a drought, times were lean, and the two families figured they could make money from a climb.
The climb itself would be free to watch. The money would come from food stands and a dance the families planned to run at the foot of the rock. Their first idea involved a large 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.
After about three weeks, the kite lodged in a crevice and wouldn’t come loose. While working it free, they discovered a long vertical crack running between two of the tower’s columns. If they could get up that crack to broken ledges about two-thirds of the way up, they figured they could climb the rest on their own. Devils Tower is made of a hard igneous rock called phonolite porphyry, and parallel cracks split it into large six-sided columns.
Newell Joyner, the monument’s custodian from 1932 to 1947, later described the problem. Everywhere else, the columns ran 550 to 600 feet up to the rim, but on the southeast corner a sloping bench cut them down to about 300 feet. That corner, he said, was about the only place on the whole tower where there was a continuous open vertical crack between two columns for their full height. The kite had caught in about the only crack a ladder could follow all the way up.
So they built the ladder. Ripley’s father and Rogers cut oak, ash, and willow trees and sawed them into pegs 24 to 30 inches long and about three inches thick, sharpened on one end. They hauled the pegs by wagon to the foot of the tower and carried them up the slope of broken rock at its base. Ripley rigged a rope and pulley to lift them up the side of the column.
The crack did the job of one missing rail of an ordinary ladder, gripping one end of every rung. A long wooden strip fastened to the outer end of every peg served as the other rail, so the pegs braced each other and the whole thing stiffened as it grew. Every peg was hammered into that crack by a man standing on the peg below it. The pegs had to be driven in from the left, because the column on the left side of the crack was flat while the rock on the right bulged out.
Ripley 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. Near the bottom, the pegs were heavy and long and set close together. Near the top, they were lighter, shorter, and farther apart. Nobody wrote down why.
The crack never reached the summit. It ended at a grassy sloping ledge, 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 later put the ladder on the National Register of Historic Places 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. Years later, she remembered the strain, saying that every day they went to work she didn’t know whether they would all come back at night, but they always did. The last peg went in around June 28th or 29th.
Because Ripley was 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 ordered a flag.
White muslin was bought at a store in Sundance, and a local woman sewed it into a flag 12 feet long and 7 feet wide. A Sundance artist named Truman Fox painted on the red stripes and blue field around 44 stars that had been marked out on the cloth. The handbill called Devils Tower one of the greatest natural wonders in the United States and 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, hay and grain for the horses, dancing day and night, and called the climb the rarest sight of a lifetime.
In May, the announcement was copied as far away as newspapers in New York and Washington. For days before the Fourth, people were on the move. Some came from Rapid City, South Dakota, 125 miles away. By the evening of July 3rd, seven or eight hundred people were already camped on the north side of the tower and along the river, and one woman had brought her feather bed.
It rained hard that night, but the morning of the Fourth came up clear and sunny. At nine o’clock, two ministers stood up in front of the crowd to speak and pray, and somebody handed Rogers a costume: an Uncle Sam suit, a white jacket with a red emblem and blue pants. A choir sang, and 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 watched a man in red, white, and blue work his way up that line of pegs with a flag in tow. The records don’t agree on how long the climb took. One history said he climbed like a squirrel and made it in about 30 minutes. Either way, by noon he was on the summit, 867 feet above the base, where a 12-foot flagpole had gone up in sections.
He raised the flag, and the cheering carried up from below. At about 2:00 in the afternoon, the wind came up. Fox, the artist who 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 fiddle at the dance that night, said it wasn’t long until the flag was torn off the pole and came whirling down. The story goes that the flag was cut into pieces right there at the foot of the tower and sold, 50 cents for a star and a quarter for a scrap of stripe. The Park Service’s history tells it that way, but the agency’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 12 years old. One study names a boy, Cyril Miller, who walked over from Spearfish, South Dakota, climbed the tower after Rogers, and then walked the 60 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. Reports on the size of the crowd ran anywhere from 800 to 1,500 people, with one history settling on about a thousand as the conservative figure. The ladder didn’t come down when the crowd went home, and over the next 13 years, more stories played out on that crack. On July 4th, 1895, two years after her husband’s climb, Linnie Rogers went up the same ladder.
She had practiced on it with him for a few days beforehand, then made the climb alone in knee-high leather boots and a navy blue bloomer suit with wide sleeves. She carried her own flag, planted it in the summit meadow, and stayed on top about 20 minutes. She is the first woman known to have reached the top of Devils Tower. Some years after Linnie’s climb, Ripley was out riding near the tower with a man named Pete Hazelbacker when the two heard voices coming from the top of the rock.
Three men had gone up the ladder and 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. On July 22nd, 1906, a 26-year-old engineer for the Homestake Mining Company named Arthur Job pulled up to the tower with a group of friends in a rented team and covered wagon.
Walking around the base, they found the old ladder. Job sent the young woman 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 15 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.
He made the top, walked around the summit, and picked up a set of cactus spines in his bare feet. Coming down, he couldn’t find the ladder at first and 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 was on the ground again around 1:30 in the afternoon, carrying rock samples and a chip off the old flagpole. 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 Devils Tower the first national monument in the country.
By 1941, the bottom 100 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, 1941, Joyner got word of something happening at the tower. At about quarter to eight in the morning, he could make out a man on the summit. His name was George Hopkins, a professional parachutist from Texas who had come up to Rapid City for an air show.
He held records for the most parachute jumps on the books, 2,347 of them. Earl Brockelsby, who owned Reptile Gardens, had bet him $50 he couldn’t land on top of Devils Tower. The plan was for Hopkins to stay up there about an hour and a half, long enough for a Rapid City radio station to put the story on the air. He jumped from 800 feet above the summit and came down on top.
He won the bet. His pilot dropped 1,000 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 then wildfire. 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 Devils 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 out the rope, 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. 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’d planned to go down that rope hand over hand.
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, and the papers were calling him Devils 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 with help from the Wyoming Highway Patrol. Over the whole week he put the number of visitors at about 7,000.
Up on the summit, Hopkins was settling in. A bottle of whiskey dropped to him the first day stayed untouched. When Joyner wanted to drop him 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 route was far beyond their ability, so they tried the second. About halfway up, that route runs into a 60-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’d led that second route up the tower in 1938 was a college student at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, and he’d 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. 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. 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 the 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. That climb happened on June 28th, 1937.
A German-born climber from New York named Fritz Wiessner came to Devils Tower with two partners, and the three of them made the first climb of the tower without the ladder. They started at 6:30 in the morning, and by 11:18 they were on the summit. Wiessner led the whole way. One of his partners described the moment they reached an overhanging ledge: Wiessner looked over the crack and said, “I think it goes.
” His partner said he wasn’t so sure, but Wiessner led them up in as magnificent a piece of mountain climbing as he had ever seen. They used exactly one piton, a small iron pin. Wiessner said afterward he wished he hadn’t used that one. He also said the climb was extremely difficult 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 got back to the base, one of the people there to congratulate them was Dolly, the widow of the man who’d 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 tried. On the stake ladder, the wood did the holding.
The climbers of the 1930s tied themselves together and moved one at a time, with the rope there to catch a fall. That’s called belaying. 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. To come down, a climber slid down a rope fastened above him, which is called rappelling.
That’s the method the rescue needed. The men at the base got to work on the hard part before Durrance even arrived. At that 60-foot pitch halfway up, they secured a 30-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 Devils Tower, and the man making iron spikes for the job was married to the widow of the rancher who’d hammered in the first one. Two more climbers, Paul Petzoldt and Harold Rapp, pulled in with snow on their car. Rapp remembered what they found: “When we got to Devils 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, where 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 quarter to four that afternoon, all eight were on the summit with Hopkins, eating a lunch Joyner’s wife had made for them. 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.
” Field said Hopkins seemed entirely nonchalant and not a bit worse for wear, and he’d been dropped about enough food to outfit a country store. At 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.
Every one of them was on the ground by eight that night. Hopkins had been on top of Devils Tower for six days. 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’s history records a series of head injuries over the next 10 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 10 years after he stood on top of the tower in that Uncle Sam suit. He’s buried in Spearfish, South Dakota. His old partner from the freight-hauling days said Rogers was a fine man and always a gentleman, adding, “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 25 and 50 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 Devils 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 known as Babe White, the human fly, came to the tower. Earlier that year, he’d climbed the Woolworth Building in New York City, the tallest building in the world at the time. White believed there was no way up Devils 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’s the last time anyone on record climbed Devils Tower on the rancher’s ladder.
During the 1930s, the Park Service removed the bottom 100 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 that 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%. 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. By 1972, what was left of the ladder up there was in bad shape.
That June, two park rangers, Terry Ripka and Bruce Bright, climbed the tower to look the old ladder over, and they decided they could save the top of it. They’d 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. On July 9th, the work started in earnest.
Ripka tightened, replaced, and moved stakes while Bright belayed him, and a third ranger, Roger Holtoff, sent tools and boards up on a pulley. The next day, Holtoff fastened the new rail to the pegs with baling 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 600-foot pulley rope. Ripka 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 by saying that when the new rail 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’s 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’s history says the top 40 feet. The National Register file says about 170.
On July 24th, 2000, the ladder was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s 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.
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’ll have to work for it. It’s on the southeast face, and next to the size of that rock, it’s small. The National Register file says it’s very hard to pick out in photographs, and that visitors usually need a telescope to find it.
Most people get to the tower off Interstate 90. 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’ll 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 5 to 8 hours, with times running anywhere from 18 minutes to 16 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’s moving all the time.
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 130 years 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.