[Illustration: _Parachutist George Hopkins, top second from left, and Superintendent Newell F. Joyner are interviewed by a Denver radio announcer on October 6, 1941, after Hopkins was rescued from the top, where he had spent six days._] [Illustration: _Jan Conn and Joan Showacre were members of the first all-woman party to climb the Tower, in 1952. Fritz Wiessner in 1937 and Jack Durrance in 1938 pioneered two of the first technical climbing routes. In 1948 Jan Conn climbed to the top with her husband, Herb._] When they reached the top, Rogers and Ripley strung up Old Glory from a flagpole they had somehow already managed to carry to the top! It was a spectacle in which many in the crowd below could claim a part. Muslin for the oversized flag apparently was purchased in Sundance, Wyoming, where it was painted and sewn together by a committee of boosters. Someone, it is said, had tailored a patriotic climbing suit of red, white, and blue that was presented to Rogers at ceremonies before the climb. Ranchers who witnessed the event said that while Rogers may indeed have risked his neck on the Tower, he reaped an entrepreneurial bonanza afterwards. During the daylong merriment and the dancing that evening, his wife and his partner’s wife ran the only refreshment stand. The flag, which had blown down, was cut up and sold for souvenirs, and the ladies made a small fortune. Perhaps the boast of the handbill published that year by the Crook County Commissioners was true: It was possible to have a better time at Devils Tower that summer than in Chicago at the World’s Fair. Rogers and Ripley raised a public spectacle perhaps not equalled until the caper of “Devils Tower George” Hopkins, the subject of a 1941 Tower-top rescue mission by alpinist Jack Durrance. Hopkins parachuted to the top and was stranded, keeping millions of newspaper readers in suspense over his fate atop the isolated rock monument few had ever seen. Durrance rescued his man five days later. Devils Tower again loomed in the national imagination, with the screening of the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” And in 1979 a televised sports show featured George Willig, the “human fly,” whose climbing antics were beamed nationwide via space satellite. As we entered the decade of the 1980s the number of registered climbs of Devils Tower surpassed the 10,000 mark. But that’s jumping ahead too quickly in the chronology of this story.