Filming locations in Wyoming

Visiting Wyoming: a set-jetting guide. Out in the empty north-east corner of the state, a single flat-topped tower of rock rises straight from the grassland, and if you have seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind you already know its silhouette. This is Devils Tower, the mountain that haunts Richard Dreyfuss into sculpting it in mashed potato, the place every character in Steven Spielberg's 1977 science-fiction classic feels compelled to reach for the great alien rendezvous.

What rewards the trip is how little the real thing has changed. The tower still stands alone, exactly as it does on screen, with nothing around it for miles but prairie and sky. Walking up to its base, you understand the pull the film gave it: it really does look like something dropped from another world, a geological oddity with no neighbours to soften the strangeness.

Everything worth doing here clusters at the foot of the monolith. Devils Tower was the first national monument the United States ever declared, and you enter on a simple vehicle pass. The paved Tower Trail loops 1.3 miles right around the base in under an hour, close enough to watch climbers inch up the fluted columns overhead, and a prairie-dog town chatters away near the entrance road.

There is no town at the tower itself, so most visitors base in the small communities nearby and drive out for the day, fitting it into a wider road trip across the high plains. Come in the morning or stay for dusk, when the light turns the rock amber and the crowds thin. Bring water and sun cover; this is exposed, remote country with little shade and long distances between stops.