Bear Butte

Bear Butte stands by itself a few miles northeast of Sturgis, a mass of igneous rock that pushed up under the plains and was left standing when the softer layers around it wore away. The Lakota call it Mato Paha, Bear Mountain, for the sleeping bear its outline makes from a distance. To the Cheyenne it is Noahvose, the place where the people were taught: their prophet Sweet Medicine went into the mountain and came out with the laws and the Sacred Arrows that made them a nation. Artifacts found around its base go back some ten thousand years.

It is still a place of prayer, and the state park is run around that fact. People come to fast and seek visions on its slopes, and the strips of colored cloth and small bundles of tobacco tied in the pines along the trail are prayers, to be left where they hang and not photographed up close. East of Highway 79 the park bans alcohol, and it asks that no one scatter ashes, because the mountain is not a burial ground.

The state bought the butte in 1961. Since then the Sturgis motorcycle rally has grown into an August crowd of hundreds of thousands, and campgrounds and bars have crept toward the mountain's base, a pressure Lakota and Cheyenne people have protested for decades. The summit trail climbs the south side through pine and bare rock to the top, and a bison herd ranges the grass below.