June 20 - Theodore Roosevelt National Park - Badlands, North Dakota

After a final breakfast together and fond farewells, Terry left on his way back to Albuquerque and we trundled off westward to Medora, North Dakota. Martin called to wish me a Happy Father's Day while we were on the way and the traffic was light enough on the interstate (non-existent) that I broke my usual rule and talked on the cell phone while driving. Judson also tried to call later that day after we had set up our trailer in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park (southern unit), but the signal was just too weak to hear him say anything but "Hi Dad!". We found a beautiful campsite right on the banks of the Little Missouri River (campsite number 7) from which we could see the badlands looming over us right through the trees. But we were so tired after staying up and talking for the last several days that our first order of business after a late lunch was to take a nap!

After the nap we managed to scrape together enough energy to do the loop drive around the park. That gave us glorious vistas of the curiously shaped and quite weirdly colored badlands in this section of North Dakota. Theodore Roosevelt did try cattle ranching here, and it was nice to see first hand the land he had described rather vividly in several of his articles. The banding of different colors in the steeply eroded hills is really quite fantastic; it reminded me of the South Dakota badlands area we had seen on Wanderung 3, but this area was much more verdant with lots of grass, trees and brush rather than the barren and almost moon like landscapes of the South Dakota badlands.

We also saw some wildlife on our drive including a herd of wild horses, some buffalo rather placidly grazing along the road, and several prairie dog towns. The buffalo, at least, were rather slow moving and quite large, so they were relatively easy to photograph. The little prairie dogs, on the other hand, were small and quick to jump back down into their burrows, so taking pictures of them was really quite a bit more difficult. They were not, however, quick enough to avoid a coyote who we saw having a dinner of fresh prairie dog. All in all, it was a wonderfully scenic and interesting drive, but if you come here make sure to try to drive it when the sun is out; the formations were exotically colorful when the sun was out but they faded to gray when the sky became overcast.

We returned to camp for a quick supper of pancakes as we had run out of bread, and then drove a couple of miles back into the badlands for a Ranger led walk and talk about archeology. We wandered through a prairie dog town with the little critters constantly barking out their warnings or diving down their holes while the Ranger talked about the history of the area. We also found out that Roosevelt's old Elkhorn ranch is actually outside of the park a few miles on private land and the drive is all on unimproved roads, but I figured the truck would make it if we wanted to get out there. I later got the map for the drive to Elkhorn but we didn't have the time to do the drive on this visit. Since this campground didn't have electricity, we used the battery powered fluorescent light for a bit after dark to read in our book and then turned in for the night.