Gillette, WY
In northeastern Wyoming on the Powder River Basin coal field — the largest coal-producing region in the United States, generating about 40% of all US coal. Class D, single 7,501ft runway 16/34. The mine traffic to and from the basin keeps Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific running 60+ coal trains a day past the airport. Gillette grew from a railroad-stop town of 3,500 in 1970 to over 32,000 today on the coal boom. The closest civilian field to Devils Tower National Monument, 65 miles east — the volcanic neck that became the climactic landing site in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
A 867-foot column of igneous rock rising from the Belle Fourche River valley in northeastern Wyoming. The first national monument in the United States, designated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Geologists still debate the formation — most likely a volcanic neck or laccolith intrusion that solidified underground roughly 50 million years ago, then was exposed by erosion of the surrounding sedimentary rock. The vertical columnar jointing makes the tower look striated, like organ pipes. The Northern Plains tribes — Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho — have multiple sacred stories about the tower; the Lakota name Mato Tipila means "Bear Lodge." Devils Tower's pop-culture moment came in 1977 when Steven Spielberg used it as the alien landing site in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The tower is also a destination for crack-climbing — about 5,000 ascents a year by 220 different routes.
Seventeen miles from Rushmore, a far larger figure is slowly emerging from Thunderhead Mountain. In 1948, Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear invited sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to carve a memorial to Crazy Horse — the Oglala Lakota leader who fought at the Little Bighorn — so that, in Standing Bear's words, the white man would know "the red man has great heroes too." Ziolkowski worked it largely alone, then with his family, until his death in 1982; his descendants continue. The completed face alone is 87 feet tall — taller than all four Rushmore heads. When finished, the full figure of Crazy Horse astride his horse, arm outstretched, will be the largest sculpture on Earth, 563 feet high. It takes no federal money, by the family's choice — which also means it will never close in a government shutdown, and may not be finished for generations.
Gutzon Borglum spent 1927 to 1941 carving the 60-foot faces of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln into a granite cliff in the Black Hills — a project conceived to draw tourists to South Dakota that became one of the most recognizable images in the country. The scale is hard to grasp until you're there: each head is as tall as a six-story building, the eyes 11 feet wide. Borglum chose the four presidents to represent the nation's founding, growth, preservation, and development. He died in March 1941; his son Lincoln finished the work that October, and the faces have been essentially untouched since — the granite erodes only about an inch every 10,000 years.
One of the largest state parks in the country at 71,000 acres, Custer sits in the granite heart of the Black Hills and is famous for two things: its free-roaming bison herd of roughly 1,300 head — one of the largest publicly owned herds anywhere — and the Needles Highway and Wildlife Loop, drives that thread between towering granite spires and through open grassland where the buffalo, pronghorn, and "begging burros" wander across the road. Every fall the park holds the Buffalo Roundup, where riders drive the entire herd across the prairie to be sorted — a genuine working spectacle that draws 20,000 spectators. The 1920 State Game Lodge hosted Coolidge's and Eisenhower's "Summer White Houses."