Mato Tipila/Bear’s Lodge Butte [Devil's Tower], Wyoming. From W[est] side showing millions of tons of fallen rock. Tower 800 feet high from its base, by Grabill, John C. H., 1890.

1) 3577b

2) 3577a

According to the Native American tribes of the Kiowa and Lakota, a group of girls went out to play and were spotted by several giant bears, who began to chase them. In an effort to escape the bears, the girls climbed atop a rock, fell to their knees, and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them. Hearing their prayers, the Great Spirit made the rock rise from the ground towards the heavens so that the bears could not reach the girls. The bears, in an effort to climb the rock, left deep claw marks in the sides, which had become too steep to climb. Those are the marks which appear today on the sides of Devils Tower. When the girls reached the sky, they were turned into the stars of the Pleiades.

Close viewing of resp. image 3577b and 3577a leads to more questions than answers: exactly the same vantage point, it's likely to be the same day (looking at the rock configuration in the foreground), but in the first image the left side seems to be 'cut of' at the base, in an attempt to make it look smaller and higher? The tree that appears on the left in the second image seems to confirm this. So is it really 'bluriness' as the first image is qualified by LOC? When enlarged it almost seems like a ghost-like layered transparancy. How come? Another lens? Retouche? Or spirits? Only God knows why.