Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark

The Medicine Wheel is a circle of stones roughly eighty feet in diameter, with a cairn at its center and lines of rock running outward to the rim like spokes. Around the circle sit several more stone cairns, spaced at points along and beyond the rim. The whole arrangement was built simply from the loose stones of the mountain, gathered and placed by hand.

It is one of the best known of many such stone wheels found across the northern plains and mountains, and among the most elaborate. Built and used over a long period, it represents the work and devotion of generations rather than a single moment of construction.

Researchers have noted that some of the cairns and spokes of the Medicine Wheel appear to align with the rising and setting of the sun at the summer solstice, and with the rising points of certain bright stars. These alignments suggest the wheel served, among its purposes, as a way of marking the turning of the seasons and the movement of the heavens.

The precise meanings are held by the Native peoples connected to the site rather than fully explained by outside study. What is clear is that the builders had a deep knowledge of the sky and the horizon, and that the wheel ties the ground of this high ridge to the movements of the sun and stars overhead.

The Medicine Wheel remains sacred to many Native nations of the plains and mountains, who continue to come here to pray, to seek visions, and to hold ceremony. It is not a ruin or an abandoned relic but a place of ongoing spiritual life, cared for jointly by the tribes and the land managers who protect it.

Visitors will see cloth, tobacco ties, and other offerings fastened to the rope fence that surrounds the wheel. These are prayers left by people who hold the site sacred, and they are to be left undisturbed. Approaching quietly and respectfully is the way to honor a place that still means so much to living communities.

Part of what makes the Medicine Wheel so moving is its setting near the top of the Bighorn Mountains. The site sits on an open, treeless ridge at nearly ten thousand feet, with immense views across the ranges and basins of north central Wyoming. The walk in along the ridge, exposed to the wind and the wide sky, is part of the experience.

At this elevation the weather can be cold and stormy even in the height of summer, and snow can linger late and arrive early. That high, austere setting, so far above the ordinary world, is inseparable from the sense of reverence the place inspires.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.