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The fee is $25 plus $5/person, not to exceed $40.Ĭommercial Tours (seating capacity 7-25 people) - $40.00 These entrance fees are based upon the seating capacity of the commercial tour vehicle - not the actual number of passengers.This may also be used to calculate the cost for organized non-profit groups (service organizations, scout groups, religious groups, etc.)Ĭommercial Tours (seating capacity 1-6 people) - $25.00 Individuals 15 years of age or younger are admitted free. Admits one individual when entering on foot or bicycle.Fee for a single motorcycle and operator/passenger.Fee for a single, private, non-commercial vehicle and all its passengers.The Red Beds Trail covers a much wider three-mile loop around the tower. This self-guided hike offers close-up views of the forest and wildlife, not to mention spectacular views of the Tower itself. The 1.25-mile Tower Trail encircles the base. The stone pillar is about 1,000 feet in diameter at the bottom and 275 feet at the top and that makes it the premier rock climbing challenge in the Black Hills. Devils Tower is also remembered as the movie location for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Known by several northern plains tribes as Bears Lodge, it is a sacred site of worship for many American Indians. One legend has it that a giant bear clawed the grooves into the mountainside while chasing several young Indian maidens. The mountain’s markings are the basis for Native American legend. While visiting the park you are bound to see deer, prairie dogs, and other wildlife. The park is covered with pine forests, woodlands, and grasslands. The two-square-mile park surrounding the tower was proclaimed the nation’s first national monument by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Once hidden below the earth’s surface, erosion has stripped away the softer rock layers revealing the Tower. The Tower is a solitary, stump-shaped granite formation that looms 1,267 feet above the tree-lined Belle Fourche River Valley, like a skyscraper in the country. Devils Tower sits across the state line in northeast Wyoming. With such a preparation for the performance of his duties as sovereign, it is no wonder that his reign, extending from 1597 to 1651, should embrace the period of Bavarian history in which the greatest number of witch prosecutions occurred, and the proceedings were most systematically and relentlessly conducted by both secular and ecclesiastical tribunals.Devils Tower National Monument, a unique and striking geologic wonder steeped in Native American legend, is a modern-day national park and climbers' challenge. In 1589, when the prince was only seventeen years of age, he was commissioned by his father, Duke Albrecht V, surnamed the Magnanimous, to witness and report the torture and burning of alleged witches at Ingolstadt, and his letters, now preserved in the Bavarian archives, reveal an amount of crass credulity and callousness of soul in the presence of human suffering wholly inconsistent with the good sense and susceptibility for which this youth was otherwise distinguished. His preceptor, Johann Baptist Tickler, a theologian who had dabbled in law, was the author of a book entitled Judicium generate de pænis maleficarum, magorem et sortilegorum utriusque sexus, in which the combined erudition and casuistry of the jurist and the divine are used in justification of the utmost rigor in punishing sorcery and sortilege. This perversion of so many excellent endowments was due chiefly to his early education. Oh, out upon these enemies of the divine honor! Does not the Holy Writ expressly command, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live? I appeal to God's behest and call, as loud as I can, on bishops, princes, and kings to destroy with fire and sword this worst of human pests."ĭuke Maximilian I was in many respects a remarkable man, with uncommon keenness of intellect, strong sense of duty, untiring energy, deep religious feeling, and rare appreciation of the fine arts, but these superior qualities did not prevent him from being a fanatical witch persecutor. "Thousands of this hellish brood have been burned at the stake" he exclaims, "and shall we accuse their judges of an unjust sentence? Nevertheless there are such extremely frigid ( frigidissimi) Christians, who are unworthy of this name, and who resist with might and main the extirpation of this crew, in order, as they say, that, forsooth, the innocent may not suffer. He was somewhat celebrated as a pulpit orator, and waxed eloquent in describing injuries done to crops and kine and human beings by the maleficence of witches. Another still more fervid zealot of this work was this Jesuit Jeremias Drexel, court preacher of Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria from 1615 to 1638.