In northeast Wyoming, near Sundance, one day last week, Parachutist George Hopkins leaped out of an airplane to win a $50 bet. The problem was to collect. For George Hopkins landed, as the bet prescribed, on Devil's Tower. A lava blister, formed by an eruption 20,000,000 years ago, Devil's Tower is a gigantic rock stump rising 1,200 feet into the sky. Teddy Roosevelt made it the country's first national monument. Its weathered sides are fluted, nearly vertical, practically unscalable.
While a crowd held its breath and stared, Hopkins tried to lower himself on a length of...
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