Devils Tower vs. a Real Petrified Stump: We Put the Giant Tree Theory to the Test

On October 1, 1941, a parachutist named George Hopkins dropped onto the flat summit of Devils Tower, Wyoming, 867 feet above its base. Minutes later, the package carrying his thousand-foot rope, a sledgehammer and a car axle slid over the edge. He spent six days on bare rock in cold rain and 50-mile-an-hour winds before Jack Durrance's climbing team reached him. From the trail below, the tower looks like the stump of an impossible tree, fluted like bark and sawn flat on top, and many visitors still see exactly that. So what is Devils Tower really made of, and what drew the long grooves down its sides? This documentary gives the giant tree theory a fair trial. We set the tower beside a real petrified stump in Colorado, twelve feet wide and about 34 million years old, and put a slice of the tower's rock, ground thinner than paper, under the microscope. Along the way, we follow a ladder of wooden pegs hammered up a crack in 1893, four hundred stone columns counted in California, an Irish engraving whose 1768 caption changed how such columns were read, and a USGS laser survey of the whole tower, column by column. Built from archival photographs, period newspaper coverage of the 1941 rescue, historical engravings, geological specimens and published survey data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Park Service. 📌 Chapters 0:00 Intro 4:02 What the First Surveyors Wrote 7:17 A Real Stump, Twelve Feet Across 11:10 Rings, Bark and a Ladder of Pegs 14:11 The Pieces at the Foot 17:45 The Devil's Woodpile and an Irish Shore 22:05 The Shape Nobody Can Rebuild 24:36 The Slice and the Laser 28:42 The Summit He Could Not Leave Which moment hit you hardest: Hopkins stranded on the summit, the petrified stump side by side with the tower, or the rock under the microscope? Tell us in the comments. — Archive footage and photographs: Pexels, Storyblocks, Wellcome Collection, Wikimedia Commons, YouTube. Licensed stock: Pixabay (illustrative; it does not show the people named). Some scenes are illustrative AI-generated reconstructions; they are not archive images. Creative Commons attributions: CC BY 2.0: claralieu, Frank Kovalchek from Anchorage, Alaska, USA, James St. John, James St. John (jsj1771) ( https://www.flickr.com/people/jsjgeology/ ), Jeff Kramer from Austin, US CC BY 2.5: author not stated on Commons CC BY 3.0: Luscak, Michael Gäbler CC BY 4.0: Boris Lobastov, James St. John, Wellcome Collection CC BY-SA 2.0: dun_deagh, Dylan Ashe, Paul Morris (Paul J. Morris on Flickr) https://www.flickr.com/people/aa3sd/, Simaron from Lower Saxony, Germany, Suzanne Mischyshyn, thejackrustles CC BY-SA 3.0: Daniel Mayer ( talk · contribs ), Fredlyfish4, Robert M. Lavinsky, Stefan Fussan CC BY-SA 4.0: Bärbel Miemietz, ChipWitz, Chris Light, Doc Searls (Devils Tower aerial.jpg) Walter Siegmund (Belle Fourche River 19A.JPG) arranged and modi, Elwood P. Dowd, Frederik Lerouge, kallerna, Luk~commonswiki, Neil P Thompson, Peer Gatter, Rachelhunggg, Raymond Maxa, Reinhard Kraasch, Ringwoodit, Vijayanrajapuram, Vladlen Terezhe, Марися Лебідь Licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Music: Original music composed for LANDFORM LEDGER (Suno). #DevilsTower #Geology #Documentary