Motorcycles and Extraterrestrials

After five days of driving, today finally brought us to our general destination of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and  northern Utah.  We started the day at the western end of South Dakota in Rapid City, and headed northwest into Sturgis, the location of the (in)famous motorcycle rally that is held every August.   

As many as 600,000 show up during the course of the week-long event, in a town whose annual population is less than 7,000.  Storefronts and bars that are empty for most of the year come to life during that first week in August, and some residents even rent out their homes and leave town for the event.

File picture from a previous year's rally

There were no such crowds when we were there, and hardly any motorcycles - just a couple that appeared out of nowhere when I stopped to take a picture of an empty bar.  

Next year's event (August 2015) will be the 75th annual, and as many as 750,000 bikers are expected.

Next stop - Devil's Tower Wyoming, our country's first national monument, as declared by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.  

The tower is the result of magma rising up from the ground and the effects of erosion on it over the years, but I think I like the Native American explanation for its formation better: the story goes that the monolith rose up under the feet of seven Indian girls who were trying to escape from a bear; the bear's "claw marks" can still be seen on the sides of the Tower, but the girls were eventually raised so far into the sky that they formed the Seven Sisters constellation, also known as the Pleiades.  

No matter what you believe, I can see why the Tower sparked the imagination of director Steven Spielberg in his 1977 movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".