"Close Encounters" and Devils Tower KOA

Above, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is screened nightly
with Devils Tower in the background. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

During our recent trip up to Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and South Dakota, one stop was at Devils Tower National Monument, famous for appearing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It took us a few hours to reach Devils Tower from the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana.

During our one-night stay at the Devils Tower KOA Kampground, we joined other campers for the nightly screening of the movie. 

Above, a view of Devils Tower from our campsite. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

The KOA screens the movie every night when they are open. In an article in 2023, Cowboy State Daily showed that they seemed to have a larger screen and provided some seating. When we attended, the screen was smaller and we had to bring our own chairs. 

Still, we enjoyed our screening (until it started getting cold out). 

The Cowboy State Daily article began with:

DEVILS TOWER — What was once a common hayfield is now an uncommon campground.

The Devils Tower KOA campground is No. 1 in the national campground system for having above 90% occupancy on one-night stays during the summer season.

A lot of that is location.

“We’re the perfect distance from Mount Rushmore to Yellowstone,” Zannie Driskill, who co-owns the Devils Tower KOA with her husband Ogden, told Cowboy State Daily. “So, if you leave Cody, you get here late afternoon or early evening. And if you leave Mount Rushmore, you get here, you know, a little after lunch and you can be here all day. And if you jump up the next morning, you can be in Cody without traveling too hard or anything.”

But there’s more at work here than just near-perfect distance from two world-famous landmarks.

The campground itself is a one-of-a-kind experience. It’s located just below Devils Tower, the tallest columnar formation of its kind in the world, and it’s where Steven Spielberg filmed “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” a 1977 box office smash that set records and helped rescue Columbia Pictures from bankruptcy.

To read the full article, go here.