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| The North Dakota badlands |
When Theodore Roosevelt was a young man, he traveled to
Medora, North Dakota to hunt bison in the badlands along the Little Missouri
River. About a year later, his wife died
in childbirth and his mother succumbed to typhoid on the same day in the same
house. Roosevelt returned to Medora to
grieve and heal. The North Dakota badlands
ended up changing his life. He fell in
love with the area, and purchased two ranches where he and his ranch hands
raised cattle. He gloried in what he
called the “strenuous life.”
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| The Little Missouri River below carved this magnificence |
The tenuous ecological balance that he came to understand in
this harsh landscape, so different from his home in New York, informed his
conservation efforts during his Presidency.
He has been called the Conservation President, creating the US Forest
Service, 5 national parks, 18 national monuments and 150 national forests - a
total of over 230 million acres of protected land.
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| A young bison |
He is quoted as having said, “I never would have been
President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota.” (1918) Theodore Roosevelt National Park was founded
to honor him and preserve these unusual geological formations in 1947.
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| Our campground was beside the Little Missouri River and great scenery |
The North Dakota badlands were formed by the Little Missouri
River, relentlessly flowing, meandering and eroding the soft strata of sand, earth
and rock that had accumulated over the centuries. Wind, rain and snow also contribute to the
erosion. The striped cliffs and
formations that were exposed are breathtaking.
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| Look at that strata! |
Theodore Roosevelt National Park has 3 units. We visited the South and North units. The location of Roosevelts Elkhorn Ranch
house composes the third unit, and can only be reached by 4-wheel drive
vehicles.
The South Unit
The South Unit is located next to the town of Medora. Probably because there is a place to stay
nearby in the town (more about that later), it is the most heavily visited of
the two units. There is a Visitors
Center with a 13-minute movie, nice historical displays, and a gift shop. From there you can drive along a 36-mile loop
road, stopping at overlooks and trailheads.
About a 1/3 of the road was closed for maintenance, so we drove what we
could and returned back the same way.
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| Dana along the Boicourt Trail |
We hiked out on the overlook to Wind Canyon stopping every
few feet to photograph the amazing view.
A later hike along Boicourt Trail ends atop a narrow promontory above
the cliffs. So stunning and a little
scary.
We saw many prairie dogs in “towns”, vast empty fields with
piles of dirt marking the entrances to their tunnels. The prairie dogs are busy eating vegetation,
visiting each other, and watching out for dangerous things. One prairie dog town was taken over by a herd
of bison, grazing, lying down, and rolling in the dust. The prairie dogs had gone into their tunnels
waiting for their shaggy, enormous visitors to leave.
The North Unit
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| Schooner came with us to the North Unit |
The North Unit is about an ho
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| Bentonitic clay |
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| Distinctive blue-grey coloring |
The colors in the North Unit are a bit different, with the
addition of bentonitic clay – a blue-grey substance that flows when wet, and dries
as hard as stone. The orangish color in
both parks is Clinker, stone that has been “cured” and taken on iron by heat
from a fire in an adjacent coal strata (the black stripes).
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| Cannonball Concretions - more are hidden inside the cliff and will be exposed by erosion |
The North Unit also has these unusual Cannonball Concretions
– spherical shapes formed by mineral rich water leaving minerals behind as it
flows through the strata. The minerals
act like glue, binding the sediments together.
The concretions come in many shapes, when it is spherical it is called a
Cannonball Concretion.
Medora, North Dakota
The written history of Medora starts with the Lakota people being
relocated off this land by the US government and onto reservations to make way for
the railroad. The railroad helped Madora
become a cattle boom town. The town itself was
founded by the Marquis de Mores (who named it after his wife). He built a meat packing plant with the idea
of shipping beef back East in refrigerated train cars. A particularly harsh winter that killed a lot
of the livestock ended Medora’s history as a cattle town.
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| Medora Musical - children in the audience are invited onstage for one number |
The town of Medora shrank away. In the early 1960s, a Bismark philanthropist,
Harold Schafer, began investing in the town.
He built a hotel and reconstructed the Joe Ferris General Store. When the park decided to stop their outdoor
drama about Roosevelt, he bought the outdoor amphitheater and created a musical
extravaganza featuring the Old West, Teddy Roosevelt, and patriotism, that shows nightly as the Medora Musical. You can also have a fun-filled dinner at the Pitchfork Fondue, where steaks are cooked on pitchforks in oil. We enjoyed the Musical with the glorious
badlands as a backdrop. We didn’t try the
fondue.
Schafer created and donated all his holdings to the Theodore
Roosevelt Medora Foundation. In addition
to the Musical and the Fondue, they run hotels, restaurants, a campground
(where we camped), a golf course, ice cream parlors and other attractions in
town. The town population of 100 people
swells in the summer with hundreds of seasonal workers, brought in by the Foundation
who are provided food and lodging in Foundation owned facilities. They are building the Theodore
Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora and the Foundation is making plans to
make the town a year-round destination.
If you've been following us for a while, you might remember that we visited other badlands in Badlands National Park in South Dakota in 2016. Here is our post from that visit.
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