The Dakotas: Through Amber Waves to The Badlands

Power lines … hills … cows … giant eagle nest … dead white tree … eagle … sunflowers … plains … Boyhood Home of Louis L’Amour … cell tower … bright gold wheat field … fields of round bails … soybean field … black cows … grain silos … piles of round bales … oil derricks … gigantic cow statue … 

“We can, of course, sit around and say to each other the names of nearby things, but that would be an idiotic enterprise suitable for nothing more important than passing the time on long automobile rides.” -Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

Nouns don’t make a language, naming things doesn’t communicate much. But it does pass the time when one is driving ten and a half hours from southwest Michigan to Fargo, North Dakota. Besides being even more frightfully flat and expansive to Astrid’s agoraphobic senses, the passing and gently changing landscape wasn’t particularly interesting, except that it represented agriculture–acres of wheat, soy, sunflowers and corn.

But the landscape was more intriguing than the audio book that rambled on from the car speakers. Astrid, Bjorn and Snorri listened to the novel Eragon, by Christopher Paolini. A better phrase might be “was distracted by” or “tolerated” the story.  (Mini book review: It is, more or less, a contrived, derivative, obese, but engaging wizard/dragon/dwarf/elf/journey story.) It provided good talking points on “good vs bad story telling, subjective tastes in literature, copy-cat fiction, and the value of a good editor.

In Fargo, the family picked up dinner at a local Chik-fil-A, then took it back to their hotel room to eat, because COVID. Although their hotel room had a “seal of cleanliness” on the door, Astrid’s detail-oriented eyes were not impressed. There were hand smudges on various handles and knobs and dirt on the carpet, but not for long. Because COVID, she brought sanitizing wipes and wiped down all the touch points in the room, then was comfortable enough to eat. 

The next morning they set out westward on I-94 again, into a land full of bucolic nouns, through Bismarck and a dozen other small towns to finally stop at the most curious landscape Astrid she’d ever seen: The Badlands, particularly Theodore Roosevelt Nation Park South (TRNP). 

Silver Buffaloberry

Their first stop was at Painted Canyon Visitor Center and Overlook where they … overlooked the canyon. They were in the Badlands, what stretched out before them was myriad dirt/rock hillocks of different sizes running on for miles, with gullies and tough, short trees and shrubs eking out a life amongst it all.  

They located the trail head to Painted Canyon Nature Trail and  headed into the stark terrain that was new experience to all of them. 

Before the trip, Astrid watched videos about the parks. The only things that stood out was that it was rough, dry and hot hiking, and sometimes there were bison and there were snakes. Sometimes, there were Prairie Rattle Snakes, which are poisonous, and of course, that’s all she could look for for the first few days.  

Despite walking in the hoof-steps of some probably very big bison, they saw no animals save their fellow humans on that picturesque, first foray into the badlands. 

But there were some very interesting plants: creepy black low trees, Silver Buffaloberry (Shepherdia argentea) and Prickly Pear (Opuntia spp.). 

 

After the hike, they drove through Medora, North Dakota to TRNP, registered and drove into the park, over the highway that cut into it, into the fenced-off hills. The road climbed and turned into grassy hills, then into dirt hills, then grassy plains filled with curious little holes. 

Because they might be looking for much bigger animals, i.e. bison, a visitor could drive right by the prairie dog towns and not know it until one of the little critters runs across the road in front of them. The “towns” consist of plains and small hills pock-marked with little eruptions of dirt surrounding prairie dog holes. The little vermin usually sit on their door stoop, looking around, chirping gossip to their neighbor doing the same, or grooming. Funny little things. 

Next, they stopped at Wind Canyon Trail, a short trail looped over hills of rock and dirt, overlooking pastures of bison and deer above a muddy, hoof-pocked Little Missouri River. 

Back in Medora, they walked the small-town streets looking for penny smashers in the various shops. Smashed pennies had become a tradition and the family tried to take one from every trip they took. It was something tangible, a proof they were in a place. 

Medora is a small town, but it has direct ties to Theodore Roosevelt, our 26th president. His Elkorn Ranch was situated north Medora. He served as deputy sheriff there for a season. Roosevelt credits his time in The Dakotas with developing the personal qualities he would need to be president. 

After smashing the penny, they walked through the town to Rough Riders Hotel and Dining for dinner. They ate a nice, big dinner, because they would be walking in Teddy Roosevelts footsteps later that night: they were roughing it, camping–in tents. 

Astrid and Snorri had a lot of experience camping in groups. Astrid was very comfortable with it. What made her nervous that day was 1) Prairie Rattle Snakes 2) new and unknown landscape and 3) bison. 

In her group camping experiences, Astrid was used to hearing a variety of night sounds : snoring, very creepy, haunting coyote yowls and small vermin scratching at tents or scurrying through camp. Sometimes ferocious carnivorous beasts alarmed her imagination at night when she lay awake, but it didn’t concern her much. She relied on statistics and personal precedent: with more people around for the hungry carnivorous beasts to eat, she figured she would be ignored (or picked last, as in so many of her previous experiences in life) and could get away while the beasts were harassing the many other campers. But camping with just Bjorn and Snorri put the odds way up. The ferocious beasts, real and imaginary, had three choices this time, and having red hair usually made her stick out. 

After dinner and dessert, and the use of the clean, not-a-tree bathrooms in the hotel, they set out again, back into TRNP, back to where they would spend the night. 

Boicourt Overlook

They passed the prairie dog town and the Wind Canyon Trail, and drove slowly, looking around at the park. They stopped at Boicourt Overlook and Trail, walking into the stark, dry and stony landscape overlooking more of the same, painted with the mute colors of different kinds of sediment. It didn’t ease Astrid’s anxiety about camping. The terrain before them was challenge to walk into, let along to set up a tent in. 

The next stop was Buck Hill Trail, where they would be camping. To backcountry camp in TRNP, one must walk at least one-fourth a mile off trail, and not be visible to any roads or trails. In this instance, it is a real advantage to have nature-colored tents, because though they had walked more than the required one-fourth mile off the official trail, in the morning, Astrid discovered that they could see two roads, one highway, one park road (which they were not aware of when they put down the tents behind a shrubby cover). 

Astrid had packed a backpack with “the house” for these camping nights–two tents, three sleeping mats, three sleeping bags, two tarps, two camp stools, extra blankets and a camp stove. They parked the car, gathered all the things they would need (food, clothes, First Aid kit, water, e-reader), loaded Snorri with the “house” backpack and started their hike, along something that looked a lot like a trail, but wasn’t marked on a map, because large, lumbering animals made it, and marked it as theirs. 

"Nothing could be more lonely and nothing more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses, when the lengthening shadows had at last merged into one and the faint after-glow of the red sunset filled the west." -Theodore Roosevelt

“There are two different kinds of manure here,” Snorri remarked after they had set up camp and sat watching as the sun went down. He had set up his tent backing to and touching Astrid’s and Bjorn’s. He was a little unsure of the endeavor, too, and was especially wary of the little cacti all around. 

“Yes, I noticed. One splat-like, one, a bunch of ball-like pieces,” Astrid said, but didn’t think too much about the significance. She was still looking out for rattlesnakes. 

Bjorn set up his camera at a ledge of rock covered in shrubs and started clicking away at the night sky, while Snorri and Astrid went into their tents to read.

Night fell, Astrid turned off her e-reader and made an effort to sleep. She could hear the tent flapping in the breeze, a few coyote solos far off, and the faint sound of Bjorn’s camera clicking, but eventually these sounds faded into the background and her mind started down the soft slope from consciousness into sleep.