by Richard Seifried
Signal Hill Musings
July 2006
From a sign at the beginning of the trail to Medicine Wheel:
FIVE SPRINGS
Crossroads of Culture
Several of the prehistoric trails that led through the Big Horn Mountains intersect here. The first people using these trails may have entered the area on the very same path you are now using as long as 10,000 years ago!
Over time, possibly due to rising temperatures and a decrease in moisture, the buffalo-centered plains people interacted with the hunters and gatherers of the mountains, sharing this trail system. The trail you are now following was the main access to the Medicine Wheel for those Ancient Americans.
Today, Native American people and cultures from around the world still cross paths here. Native American Indians, representing 81 different tribes, still utilize this ancient trail to practice their traditional ceremonies. Some traditional people prepare themselves for over a year for their journey to the Medicine Wheel. You may cross paths with them here! Please respect the needs of visitors here for prayer, meditation, inspiration, or solitude by giving them space and not taking their picture.
Most American Indian people feel that the Big Horn Medicine Wheel is for “All People.”
I am writing this at 3 a.m. Doing so is very difficult, and I don’t know why. Perhaps I fear that you recipients will not get my message or maybe you will not believe me. In my long life, I have experienced many mysteries but none are as puzzling as those involving Medicine Wheel, the prehistoric formation that sits atop a nearly 10,000 foot mountain in Wyoming.
Medicine Wheel is a mystical place. Why else would the ancients create such a precise “Stonehenge” that indicates sun position during the equinoxes and the solstices? Building the wheel must have been relatively easy, except for the precision alignment required. The stones that make up the wheel are smallish, and the mountaintop contains thousands of them, just lying about.
So then, what is the compulsion that draws me to it, to climb well above 9,000 feet and gaze, three times now, at this celestial timepiece? Here is my story.
Each visit has somehow impressed upon me the importance, the special significance, of the place. My feelings, my emotions for the location, cannot be adequately described. I will simply write what happened, what I experienced each time I was there.
My first visit to Medicine Wheel could have been in 1986 or 1987. The month was early June. The road leading me there was Alternate U.S. 14 that runs high up in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming.
There must have been some sort of sign, a very small one, that directed me to turn north onto a dirt road that led me high up on a rather gentle mountainside. Where the road closed in toward the base of the last upward slope, a large snowdrift blocked my passage. The obstruction ran downhill from my left, covering the road with as much as ten feet of snow.
I parked the car, grabbed my camera, and armed with only my hunting knife, proceeded across the drift and upward along the mountainside. To my right, there was an impressive drop of a hundred feet or so ending in a luxuriant parallel valley that ran between higher slopes on each side. By “valley,” I mean it was a mere fifty to one hundred feet across.
Down below, walking in the same direction as I, ambled a wolverine. I had never seen one before, so I watched, fascinated, as the largest species of the weasel family poked along its way.
Walking on for a short distance, I came to the junction of a sort of jeep trail that led upward toward the summit. I looked up (to the southwest) and there, on the near horizon, at the top of the mountain, stood an enormous reinforced concrete fortress.
Naturally, I was surprised and became a little nervous. I felt as if I were being watched. The fortification was tiered, maintaining at least three levels. Along the walls facing me were horizontal slits, each perhaps six feet long and eighteen inches high.
My uneasiness increased so I took out my binoculars and studied the massive structure. There were no symbols, no flags, nothing but the gigantic fortress-like structure itself. If I took pictures, I do not recall doing so and they must not have developed properly.
To this day, I remember my anger, thinking that our government had no right to desecrate the location with such a senseless and expensive structure.
My path continued up a rather steep rise and suddenly there it was, Medicine Wheel. Unobstructed by fences, it was exposed to whomever, whatever came by.
Obviously, I was impressed.
A few years later in the early ‘90s, I took Jean up there. We encountered no snowdrift (it was later in the summer) and were able to drive right up to the wheel. Unfortunately, white men had moved stones around and probably stole some, so the State of Wyoming, or the Crow Nation, had put up a tall, metal fence with barbed wire running along the top.
Jean and I spent some time there, walking around the fence, attempting to get decent pictures. At one point, at the west-northwest edge, outside of the fence, a place where there were irregularities in the earth’s surface, we encountered powerful energy forces, like electrical rays rising out of the earth. The hairs on our arms stood up and we experienced tingling sensations.
What really made my second visit peculiar was the fact that there was no fortification on the mountaintop. A pickup truck attached to a tiny camper-trailer sat on the upper road, just beneath where the fortress had been.
No concrete fortress. Nothing but mountain and sky. I recall wondering why the fortress had been removed and where had they taken the tons and tons of rubble.
When I got home, I related my two encounters there with the Gears, archaeology friends of ours, who suggested that I had somehow experienced a time warp and had likely witnessed an image from the future. I cannot accept that idea. Rather, I believe that I experienced a sort of mental block, a deceptive image that prevented me from seeing what was really there, atop that magnificent Bighorn mountain.
My last visit was this year, in June of 2006. My son-in-law Tom Shafer and I had designated Medicine Wheel to be a main objective on our trip to Wyoming. The Western Writers Association of America had listed a specific day for attendees to visit the Wheel. Local Native Americans were supposed to meet the visitors and take them to the site. I decided that we didn’t want to visit the wheel with a bunch of other people and that we would stop there on our way from Yellowstone National Park, after the conference.
The day was lovely, bright sunny weather, warm but not hot. We found a little structure and restrooms had been built about a mile below the Wheel. There was a fence, with an open gate that closed at sunset. The State of Wyoming had decided to protect Medicine Wheel and provide visitors with information. We parked in the designated area and walked up to the one building. An elderly lady came out and greeted us. Eventually, somewhat reluctantly, I told her of my experiences with the fortress. She didn’t laugh. She smiled and after I had concluded my story, she indicated that she thought that I had experienced some sort of visual blockage and that the fortress had been an illusion. Suddenly I realized what the date was. It was June 21, 2006. I mentioned this to her and asked if it was Summer Solstice. She smiled and replied that it was.
“What a coincidence!” I exclaimed.
“Coincidence?” The lady indicated that it was no coincidence and that I was supposed to be there on such an important day. That from an obviously well-educated, very modern individual.
Tom and I hiked up the mile-long road to the wheel. Again, there was no fortress on the summit. Neither was there a camper trailer. But, up on the very top was a huge domed antenna belonging to NOAA, a quite impressive white structure.
Much to my satisfaction the high, ugly metal fence was gone. Instead, the wheel was surrounded by a lower fence, perhaps five feet high, consisting of attractive, rounded wooden posts, over a foot thick. Strands of heavy rope prevented people from easily climbing into the wheel area. A young lady, a member of a volunteer service nature organization, stood just below the wheel. Her task was to inform people about the wheel and to protect it. There was at least one ranger in the area, moving about in a state pickup truck.
Having received permission, I took a cigar I had brought as an offering, broke it into pieces, and crumpled the tobacco in four areas designating the four directions. On the east side, I placed a crow’s feather and a lovely small feather of a songbird that I had brought from Signal Hill. Only then did it dawn on me that the feather, a Crow feather, was significant because the Crow Indians protect the Medicine Wheel and they had held a ceremony that very morning, at dawn.
I found no energy rising up from the earth where Jean and I had experienced the phenomenon before. Nothing peculiar happened except for the feeling reverence that the place projects. Tom was captivated by the Wheel, and took many appropriate photos of it – and the surrounding beauty, the high mountains and distant valleys. He watched me spreading the tobacco and weaving the feathers into the fabric of material left on the fence by other Indians. There were many items secured to the fence, special things, reflecting respect for the very ancient Medicine Wheel, the Ancients who built it, and the gods that it inspired.
My story ends here and I have no conclusions. And though I am seventy-eight years old now, it would not surprise me if I visited the Wheel once again. Even as I am writing this now, I feel drawn to it, compelled to make the long journey, as so many have done before.
Post script: In 2009, Richard and I did indeed visit Medicine Wheel again as we were completing our famous Lewis & Clark trip. Richard had fallen a few days earlier while we were walking along the Pacific Ocean, so we had expected that he could be driven up to the summit in ATVs the park service utilized to assist elderly and handicapped visitors (he had turned eighty just a week prior). Unfortunately, significant snow on the trail waylaid that plan, so while I climbed two miles up to the Wheel, Richard spent a couple of delightful hours talking to two rangers manning the visitor center. Richard had arranged a small prayer bundle he wanted to leave at the site, but we couldn’t find it in the mess that was once the interior of a Toyota 4-Runner, so I built a little cairn for us instead. Richard later mailed the prayer bundle to one of the rangers, who said he would take it up for him.
