The Bighorn Medicine Wheel served as a site for fasting, vision quests, and spiritual ceremonies for multiple Native American tribes over several centuries. It also appears to function as an astronomical observatory, with stone cairns that align with the summer solstice sunrise and the rising points of bright stars. Sitting at nearly 10,000 feet in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, this stone structure remains an active sacred site for Indigenous peoples today.
What the Medicine Wheel Looks Like
The Bighorn Medicine Wheel is a roughly circular pattern of stones about 82 feet in diameter, laid out on a flat, treeless shoulder of Medicine Mountain. At its center sits a hollow, oval-shaped cairn of stacked rocks about 12 feet across. Radiating outward from that central cairn are 28 lines of stones, like spokes on a bicycle wheel, connecting the center to an outer stone ring. Six additional cairns sit around or near the outer circle, most of them large enough for a person to sit inside.
The structure is made entirely of local limestone and is not mortared or cemented. It has been rebuilt and maintained over generations, which makes precise dating difficult. A wooden branch found wedged beneath one of the outer cairns was dated by tree-ring analysis to around 1760 AD. But some researchers believe parts of the wheel are considerably older. The outer cairns appear more deeply buried and weathered than the spokes and ring, and revised astronomical calculations suggest some features could date to between 1270 and 1470 AD.
A Place for Fasting and Vision Quests
The most consistently documented use of the Medicine Wheel is as a ceremonial site where individuals came to fast, pray, and seek spiritual visions. In the 1910s, a Crow man named Flat-Dog told anthropologist Robert Lowie that the Medicine Wheel was called the “Sun’s Lodge,” that many Crow people went there to fast, and that the structure was considered very ancient even then.
A well-known Crow oral tradition describes the wheel’s construction by a figure called Burnt Face, who fasted at the site to heal his disfigurement. The famous Crow leader Plenty Coups also fasted at the Medicine Wheel, reportedly visiting once alongside Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. These accounts point to a long tradition of using the site for vision quests, a practice in which a person isolates themselves, goes without food or water, and seeks spiritual guidance. The six outer cairns, sized to hold a sitting person, may have served as fasting stations.
Connections to Sun Dance Ceremonies
Several tribal sources linked the Medicine Wheel directly to sun dance traditions. When an elderly Cheyenne man named Elk River was interviewed by ethnographer George Bird Grinnell in 1921, he compared the Medicine Wheel to the Cheyenne sun dance lodge. The wheel’s 28 spokes match the number of rafters used in the roofs of Lakota and Cheyenne sun dance lodges, a structural parallel that multiple researchers have noted.
Anthropologist Karl Schlesier proposed that the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, along with a similar structure called the Moose Mountain wheel in Saskatchewan, may represent Cheyenne ritual lodges that predate the sun dance ceremony as it is practiced today. In this interpretation, the stone wheel is a permanent version of the wooden ceremonial lodges that tribes built and dismantled seasonally. Whether the wheel inspired the lodge design or the other way around remains debated, but the structural echo between them is striking.
Astronomical Alignments
In the 1970s, astronomer Jack Eddy studied the sight lines created by the wheel’s cairns and found that certain pairs align with important celestial events. The most prominent alignment points from one cairn through another directly toward the spot on the horizon where the sun rises on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Other cairn pairs appear to mark the rising points of several bright stars, including Aldebaran, Rigel, and Sirius.
These stellar alignments would have had practical seasonal significance. At this altitude, the site is buried under snow for most of the year and only accessible during summer months. The first appearance of a bright star just before dawn (called a heliacal rising) functions like a calendar marker. If the cairns do track these stars, they could have signaled the approach of the solstice or helped mark time during the brief summer season when ceremonies took place. Later analysis challenged some of Eddy’s specific date calculations, but the basic solstice alignment has remained widely accepted.
A Territorial and Social Marker
Not all proposed uses are purely spiritual or astronomical. Schlesier’s research also suggested the wheel may have served as a tribal boundary marker, a visible stone monument on a high, open ridge that could be seen from a distance and signaled territorial claims. The wheel sits on one of the highest accessible points in the Bighorn range, making it a natural landmark. Artifacts recovered from the site include pottery fragments, trade beads, and bone objects coated in red ochre, which suggest repeated visits by different groups over a long period. An early theory from 1913 proposed that the 28 spokes represented the 28 clans of the Sheepeater people, though that idea was later discounted due to poor sourcing.
Still a Living Sacred Site
The Medicine Wheel is not a ruin or a museum piece. It remains an active place of worship for members of the Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota, and other tribes. Visitors to the site today will see prayer cloths, bundles of tobacco, and other offerings tied to a rope fence that surrounds the wheel. These items are protected, and disturbing them is prohibited. The site is managed by the U.S. Forest Service in consultation with tribal representatives, and access is sometimes restricted during ceremonies.
The wheel sits within a larger sacred landscape. Medicine Mountain and its surrounding ridges contain dozens of other archaeological features, including stone circles from tipi camps, additional cairns, and wood-gathering areas. Researchers have noted that lichen growth on the wheel’s stones is less than on nearby tipi rings, suggesting the wheel has been maintained and its stones moved or replaced more recently than some surrounding structures. That ongoing care is itself evidence of continuous use, a site that mattered enough to be tended across generations.