This part of the country is fairly flat, not Kansas flat but not exactly hilly. In the morning I followed the Bozeman Trail for quite a ways.

My goal for the day was to revisit the Devils Tower, it appeared through the trees. There is no apostrophe in the official name though it is not known whether this was intended when it was named by Colonel Richard Dodge in 1875. In 1906 it became the first National Monument.

No Close Encounters of any kind today, and no mashed potato either.

There are some climbers up there - can you find them?

They look pretty comfortable, around 400 people climb the Tower every year. It was first climbed by William Rogers in 1893.

The tower is not just a symmetrical lump.

From there it was on to Belle Fourche, South Dakota. It's the county seat for Butte County, this is the court house.

Belle Fourche means Beautiful Fork which refers to the Belle Fourche River. The main street used to follow the river at one time and still has a few of the older buildings like this one time gas station.

There were a couple of the old style mansions by the river too.

I spent the evening in the Stadium Sports Pub mostly talking to a guy who was in charge of building an ethanol plant (using corn) nearby, I learned a lot about ethanol plants and it was quite interesting. I hadn't seen any corn growing all day but apparently it is to the east of Belle, they will be drilling wells to get water to grow corn locally. They sell the byproduct CO2 to oil companies who use it to pressurize the oil wells thus trapping it underground, I'm sure they get sequestering credits.