A game of king of the hill at Devils Monument : Plains Indians say the mountain is holy ground. But to rock climbers, it’s a playground.

For centuries, Plains Indians have made pilgrimages to the 860-foot-high volcanic monolith rising over this northeast corner of Wyoming to seek religious visions and leave prayer bundles of tobacco and sage.

But in recent years, the massive stone pillar known as Devils Tower has become better known for the challenge it provides for up to 6,000 climbers a year from around the world.

Now, Native Americans who revere the rock as a religious shrine are at odds with climbers who get another kind of high by scaling what in 1906 became the first national monument in the United States.

Native Americans are petitioning the federal government to ban the climbers, who they say desecrate a holy site by riveting its face with bolts--even urinating on its walls. They also complain that increased climbing and tourism make it impossible to hear the Great Spirit who, tradition says, created the Sioux here.

“All hell would break lose if I went to climbing the Washington Monument or the National Cathedral,” argued Francis Brown, an Arapaho and president of the Medicine Wheel Coalition for Sacred Sites of North America, which wants to protect Devils Tower and dozens of other sacred locations. “Our plan is to shut the climbing down, slowly if that is what it takes.”

No way, said Andy Petefish, who runs a climbing service near the tower and strongly objects to what he claims is an attempt to destroy a federal mandate that provides for multiple uses of the monument, including recreation.

“As far as I’m concerned, prayer bundles are a bunch of trash, and I’m very offended to have them hanging around the monument,” Petefish said. “They (monument officials) should be managing climbing based on quantifiable, scientific research on its impact on the tower, not on one group’s religious beliefs.”

Besides, he added, “the Indians get to build fires in the most beautiful meadow in the park for their sweat lodge and Sun Dance ceremonies, but they don’t climb that rock, which I own as an American citizen.”

Not all of the tower’s climbers are that intransigent on the issue. Nonetheless, the dispute is especially thorny for National Park Service officials trying to forge a compromise.

There is little doubt, however, about which side the Park Service has favored in past years.

Exhibits at the monument’s visitors center--housed in a log cabin built in the 1930s--emphasize climbing history over Native American tradition. During summer months, park rangers don climbing gear several times a day to demonstrate “handholds and foot jams” on a replica of part of a tower wall.

“The Park Service has done a poor job of including the Native American cultural perspective,” conceded George San Miguel, chief of resource management at the monument.

“History,” he said, “did not begin here in 1875.”

That year, Chief Red Cloud and other Sioux chiefs met with federal officials in Washington to discuss the transfer of mineral rights in the Black Hills, the northwest corner of which is anchored by Devils Tower--at that time part of the Great Sioux Reservation.

At the same time, miners and surveyors with a government-sponsored expedition were scouting for gold and dubbed the imposing natural citadel Devils Tower, a name Native Americans still consider offensive.

Within a few years, the government removed the gold-bearing Black Hills from the reservation, paving the way for white settlers who developed ranches near the tower.

In 1893, two of those early ranchers pounded large stakes into one of thousands of cracks in the tower--composed of vertical four-, six- and eight-sided gray stone columns up to eight feet in diameter--and made the first ascent to the summit.

Since then, 65,000 climbers have had a go at the tower. Their legacy: nearly 600 bolts pounded into its walls.

But with the growing popularity of climbing here and elsewhere on federal lands, government officials in 1991 began reviewing the impact of the sport on natural resources.

National Park officials created a task force of climbers, Native Americans and local officials to come up with a management policy amenable to all sides. Their plan calls for a voluntary climbing ban each June, when important Plains Indian ceremonies are performed.

Monument officials hope to have the plan finalized by January and implemented this spring. But the dispute may be far from over. If the voluntary closure fails, the Park Service has already threatened to impose a mandatory June climbing ban.

If that happens, climber groups would be almost certain to take their argument to court.

“Unfortunately for us,” said Jerry Flute of the nonprofit Assn. of American Indian Affairs, “our sacred sites are in very beautiful places where federal land managers are promoting their tourism value, including climbing.”