Saturday morning, September 5 marked the beginning of the end of our time in Alaska. At noon, the ferry LeConte would depart Gustavus, and on it our two-say journey home would commence.
But first, we had some last-minute things to do at Glacier Bay National Park.
Standing here, with facts so fresh and telling and held up so vividly before us, every seeing observer, not to say geologist, must readily apprehend the earth-sculpturing, landscape-making action of flowing ice. And here, too, one learns that the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation; that mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes; that moraine soil is being ground and outspread for coming plants,—course boulders and gravel for forests, finer soil for grasses and flowers,—while the finest part of the grist, seen hastening out to sea in the draining streams, is being stored away in darkness and builded particle on particle, cementing and crystalizing, to make the mountains and valleys and plains of other predestined landscapes, to be followed by still others in endless rhythm and beauty.
– John Muir, 1879, from Travels in Alaska, published posthumously in 1915
Friday, September 4 dawned overcast at Bartlett Cove. We were taking the 7:30 am boat tour of Glacier Bay, which lasted eight hours and traveled 146 miles roundtrip from the dock at Bartlett Cove, up into the end of the Bay’s West Arm and back again.
The morning of Thursday, September 3, we’d spent paddling Bartlett Cove. After lunch that afternoon, we decided to take a walk along Tlingit Trail on the southern shore of the cove. Tlingit Trail heads east from Glacier Bay Lodge and runs a mere half mile one way. The walk took us a touch over an hour out and back.
While we were getting ready for our walk, the Red Squirrel who lived in the stump just outside the window of our room was taking an afternoon break from busily building a winter’s cache of food and defending it from all comers with loud chirps and barks. I took the opportunity to capture an image.
On July 16, 2001, a Humpback Whale was found dead, its bloated carcass floating near the entrance to Glacier Bay.
The carcass was towed to shore and examined. The whale had died of what amounted to blunt force trauma to the head from being hit by a large cruise ship. Researchers identified the whale as Snow (#68), a forty-four year old female, who had been pregnant when she died.
Thursday, September 3 was sunny at Glacier Bay National Park. It was the second sunny day in a row after some six weeks of clouds and drizzle, according to the staff at the lodge.
Back in early July, while we had been planning this portion of the trip while sitting on a veranda in southern Wisconsin, I’d turned to Sean and asked which of our two full days at Glacier Bay did he want to do a half-day paddle and which did he want to do our full-day boat tour. He’d replied that we should do the paddle the morning of our first full day. Now that we were actually here, his instinct could not have served us better. The forecast was for it to be sunny and warm on Thursday, and the drizzle was supposed to return on Friday.
It was sheer luck, but we’d be paddling Bartlett Cove’s waters while they were completely calm and shimmering in the sunshine.
Glacier Bay, at the northwest end of Alaska’s Inside Passage, was established as a National Monument by President Calvin Coolidge in 1925. Coolidge acted at the urging of the Ecological Society of America. One of their members, William Skinner Cooper, had realized the area’s unparalleled potential in the study of forest succession, the development of a complete forest ecosystem from newly exposed bedrock to mature forest.
Skinner had been drawn to Glacier Bay, as many before him had, by the writings of John Muir, who “discovered” Glacier Bay in 1879 and returned in 1890 and 1899. Muir publicized the wonders of Glacier Bay in contemporary magazine articles and eventually the posthumously published Travels in Alaska (1915).
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter enlarged Glacier Bay National Monument in anticipation of the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which would eventually pass Congress in 1980. ANILCA enlarged the protected lands of Glacier Bay to over 3.2 million acres, establishing Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.
The vast majority of Glacier Bay’s 500,000 annual visitors experience the Park exclusively by boat from the deck of a cruise ship. Only five percent of visitors actually set foot on the land of Glacier Bay National Park. We were among this small fraction. (more…)
Wednesday, September 2 we departed Juneau via the Alaska Marine Highway System and journeyed to Gustavus (population 442), the gateway town to Glacier Bay National Park. Gustavus sits on the shores of Icy Passage, thirty-seven nautical miles west of Juneau. Our ferry ride would take just over four hours to reach it.
Our sailing was at 7am, but we woke at 4am because the Alaska Marine Highway System website stated we needed to check-in two hours before. The Juneau ferry dock was not on the Gastineau Channel in downtown Juneau, but rather near the northern end of the Juneau road system in Auke Bay.
We were bleary-eyed but excited as we loaded our bags into the taxi at 4:40. Our driver was a gruff, but friendly older fellow with a big beard. We chatted with him about our trip, Chicago, and that we had failed to visit “Juneau’s glacier,” the Mendenhall, while we were in town.
We arrived at the ferry terminal right around 7am, and we were the first one’s there. So we settled into some seats near a window that looked out at the water and waited for dawn.
Unlike the previous day, Tuesday, September 1 was rainless in Juneau, perfect weather for a hike up Mount Roberts, which rises immediately east of downtown. The Mount Roberts Tramway takes visitors on a gondola ride to a point 1,800 feet up the 3,800-foot mountain. We decided that instead of taking the tramway up and hiking down that we’d hike up and take the tramway down. Although the trail was only about 1.4 miles, the trailhead was about a mile from downtown, making the total hike 2.5 miles with an elevation gain of 1,800 feet. (more…)
On Sunday, August 30, we embarked on the final stage of our trip by traveling southeast to Juneau, Alaska’s beautiful capital city. Tucked between coastal mountains and the Gastineau Passage of Alaska’s famed Inside Passage, Juneau is inaccessible save by air or sea. Its population is small, only 32,000 people. Yet it is a cosmopolitan city that feels like the ultimate extension of the Pacific Northwest vibe of Portland and Seattle (and presumably Vancouver).
We decided that we could definitely live in Juneau. (more…)
Although we’d already spent two nights in Anchorage, one as we arrived in Alaska and the other between Kenai Fjords National Park and Denali National Park, it was finally time to stay for a few nights and take in Alaska’s largest city.
With a population of 300,000, Anchorage is the most populous city in Alaska and the sixty-third most populous in the United States. By comparison, Saint Louis has a population of 310,000, but Saint Louis has a much larger metropolitan population spreading out on either side of the Mississippi River. Most of Anchorage’s population is in the city and borough proper, which encompasses over 1,900 square miles, compared to 66 square miles for Saint Louis. So Anchorage is large and populous, but much less dense than comparable cities in the “lower forty-eight.”
It grew out of a tent city of rail workers that had risen in 1914 when the Alaska Railroad Corporation chose the outlet of Ship Creek on the eastern shore of Cook Inlet as its construction headquarters. The city was incorporated in 1920.
Morning was chill in Savage River Campground on Thursday, August 27, but the gripping cold that campground host, Liz, had forecast had not yet arrived. In the tent, we had a more insistent puddle than we’d had the previous morning. It had rained overnight, but in the bright gray morning, there was only occasional drizzle.
We’d started our last canister of backpacker stove fuel the day before, and it was fairly light when I started heating water in the coffee percolator. Damned if it didn’t cut out just as the coffee was done. It was the first time we’d estimated perfectly how much fuel we’d need on a trip.
Packing up over coffee didn’t take long. Our plan was to have breakfast at the park grill while we finished writing our postcards to mail from the Park. We also wanted to visit the Alaska Geographic bookstore and, of course, the Visitor Center.
After our mishap on Mount Healy, Sean and I salvaged the afternoon of Wednesday, August 26 with a visit to Denali National Park’s sled dog kennels. We arrived at the Park Headquarters parking area shortly before the 2pm dogsledding demonstration.
The use of dogsleds to patrol Denali National Park dates all the way back to Harry Karstens, who became the Park’s first superintendent in 1921 after it was established in 1917. In the winter, Park Rangers go on one-day to six-week long dogsled patrols of the inner two-million acres of designated wilderness, where motorized vehicles are prohibited. The patrols haul supplies, contact winter visitors, and prevent illegal activities like poaching and snowmobiling.
Wednesday, August 26 was rainy in the eastern part of Denali National Park. We woke in our tent at Savage River Campground to a steady rain. But unlike our overnight at Savage River on Saturday, the interior of our tent was mostly dry. We’d chosen a better-drained site for the tent than I had that earlier night. This time there was just a little puddle of moisture down near our feet, which wasn’t horrible given the insistence of the rain. (more…)
Tuesday morning, August 25, we awoke to a semi-steady rain, which had begun the night before. We would be departing Wonder Lake Campground under a thick cloud cover that only occasionally allowed the lower ridges of the Alaska Range to peek through.
As our full day at Wonder Lake continued, we enjoyed sunny skies over the tundra/taiga transition in which the campground was situated. We had spent the morning and early afternoon on a solid four-and-a-half hour hike to the McKinley River, and now, as we rested, the Alaska Range flooded the southeastern horizon with the Alaska of one’s imagination.
Next morning, Monday, August 24, the sky was filled with a layer of low, thick clouds. From our chat with Ranger Andy the previous evening, we knew that the activities of our full day at Wonder Lake Campground would be determined by whether or not the skies were clear. Since they were not, we would spend the morning and early afternoon hiking the McKinley Bar Trail from the campground through tundra and taiga to the McKinley River. Had they been clear, we’d have hiked up one of the ridges above camp to take in the view.
Wonder Lake Campground, located at mile 85 of the Denali Park Road and thereby the closest campground to The Mountain, is comprised of twenty-six tent sites mostly arrayed along a gently sloping amphitheater beneath a low ridge. Amid the campsites and stretching beneath the campground into the middle distance is a landscape sparsely studded with tall, thin Black Spruce amid low tundra brush.
Sunday morning, August 23, we awoke in a puddle. It had rained insistently all night, and at 5:20am, our tent was cold and wet. Sean had been right. We should have just slept in the Jeep, since now we had soaked gear that we had to pack up in order to catch the 7:05am camper bus to Wonder Lake Campground.
I climbed out of the tent in the pre-dawn light. It was cold, but it had stopped raining. I lit the camp stove and started boiling water in the coffee percolator. As cold as it was, somewhere in the 30s, it didn’t approach the 27 degrees we’d woken to at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. But it was damp, and the camp stove promptly grew a layer of hoarfrost and froze to the picnic table.
Denali National Park and Preserve protects over six million acres (including over two million acres of federally designated wilderness) of boreal forest, tundra, and mountains in central Alaska. It also protects North America’s highest peak, an array of glaciers and braided streams cascading from the mountains, and an intact ecosystem enlivened by Alaska’s iconic large mammals.
The Park was established in 1917 as Mount McKinley National Park, largely to protect the astonishing herds of game, those large mammals, from over-hunting. Closest to the heart of hunter, amateur naturalist, and conservationist Charles Sheldon, who was instrumental in pushing for the Park, was the Dall Sheep, the only white wild sheep. Sheldon, a monied Easterner, was a member of Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell’s Boone and Crockett Club and secured the club’s support in helping guide the bill creating the Park through Congress in the eleven years it would take to win its passage.
Mount McKinley National Park was greatly expanded, and its name changed to Denali National Park (although the mountain’s name did not then change), in 1980 with the passage of the monumental Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which enacted the ultimate distribution of federal public lands in the state. With the passage of ANILCA and its signing into law by President Jimmy Carter in the waning days of his presidency, the Park was expanded from its original two million to its current over six million acres. Some 1.3 million of those acres are Denali National Preserve, where hunting is allowed. Most of the original Park became federal wilderness.
It was late afternoon on Friday, August 21, and our time in Seward had come to an end. After our visit to the Alaska SeaLife Center, we returned to Hotel Seward, from which we were ferried via van to the train depot just north of the Small Boat Harbor. We checked in, and waited until boarding began at 5pm for our 6pm evening train back to Anchorage.
Next morning, Friday, August 21, we slept in. We would be returning to Anchorage that evening via the Alaska Railroad, and originally we had planned this to be our day to hike to Exit Glacier and possibly the Harding Icefield. But we’d switched those plans based on the weather reports. It worked out perfectly. Wednesday afternoon had been sunny and glorious for our hike. Friday, although warm, was rainy, a perfect day to be indoors at the Alaska SeaLife Center.
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Our nine-hour boat tour of Kenai Fjords National Park continued. That morning, Thursday, August 20, we’d traveled out of Resurrection Bay and down the coast, then in the early afternoon, we’d explored Northwestern Fjord. Now it was time for our last major stop before returning to Seward: The Chiswell Islands, part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.
Established like so many other public lands in Alaska by the Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act (ANILCA) in 1980, the Refuge is administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and covers 4.9 million acres from the Gulf of Alaska to the Chukchi Sea. Although they are administered by two different services of the Department of the Interior, here off the coast of Kenai Fjords National Park, the National Wildlife Refuge and the National Park act in concert to protect wildlife.
It was just about ten minutes after noon on Thursday, August 20 when the Glacier Explorer rounded Aligo Point at the tip of Harris Peninsula and entered Granite Passage, which would lead us into Harris Bay and its farthest extent, Northwestern Fjord. The morning had taken us from Seward down the length of Resurrection Bay and then along the fjords and peninsulas of Kenai Fjords National Park.
Appropriately enough, our course was northwesterly. As we sailed up Granite Passage, Harris Peninsula was to starboard and soaring, slender Granite Island was to port.
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Next morning, Thursday, August 20, we woke early, although not as early as for the train the day before. At 9am, our tour of Kenai Fjords National Park was scheduled to depart. We’d assembled our day packs, binoculars, cameras, and extra layers of clothes, after dinner the night before. Check-in for the boat was at 8am, so by 7:40, we were headed out of Hotel Seward toward the small boat harbor a short walk away near the north end of town.
The weather was even better than we’d hoped. Over the previous week, I’d begun following the weather forecast for Seward closely, watching without daring to hope that the day of our boat tour would be beautiful. Now here it was, cloudless with a forecast high of 68 degrees. The morning sun was warm as it rose over the peaks of the Resurrection Peninsula opposite town.
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Kenai Fjords National Park was established in December 1980 under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which also created six others of the eight National Parks in Alaska. The act resolved the general distribution of remaining federal lands within the state, transferring acreage to various entities, including the State of Alaska, but also retaining millions of acres within federal protection as parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, etc.
As ANILCA worked its way through Congress in the late 1970s, it had much vocal on-the-ground opposition from Alaskans and much lobbyist opposition from the extraction industries. The bill stalled multiple times, causing President Jimmy Carter to establish a series of National Monuments in 1978, among them Kenai Fjords, to ensure the protection of the most important parcels in case ANILCA stalled out completely.
Including a later expansion, Kenai Fjords National Park comprises 670,000 acres of rugged coastline, glaciers, mountains, and deep fjords. It is capped by the Harding Icefield, the largest icefield contained entirely within the United States, 300 square miles of ice spawning forty glaciers. It receives about 280,000 visitors a year.
The northern section of Kenai Fjords lies west (and above) the town of Seward (population 2,500). Seward, established in 1903 and once boasting the start of the Iditarod dog sled race, has seen boom and bust cycles based on railroad construction, shipping, fishing, and tourism. Its easy rail and highway access to Anchorage makes it an important terminus for various Alaska cruises. Its dramatic location on Resurrection Bay and its proximity to wilderness recreation make it a popular draw for Alaskans in the population centers north. And it functions as a gateway community for three major federal lands, Chugach National Forest, Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and of course Kenai Fjords National Park.
It was too early to check in, so after dropping our bags amid the robust taxidermy collection in the lobby of Hotel Seward, we went in search of lunch.
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Sean and I departed on our honeymoon trip to Alaska on Tuesday, August 18, 2015. Although there is a direct flight between Chicago and Anchorage on Alaska Airlines, we were flying on American Airlines because of the stipulations of Sean’s prize. Save that we had to make a connection through Dallas-Fort Worth, flying on American was just fine because it is our carrier of choice.
Also it allowed us two of our traveling traditions. My shot of the American Airlines fleet at O’Hare:
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Sean and I married in Chicago on August 15, 2015. At the ceremony we were surrounded by eighty family and friends. It was a beautiful evening full of happiness.
Three days later, on August 18, we departed on our honeymoon, a three-week long trip to Alaska that included three National Parks: Kenai Fjords, Denali, and Glacier Bay.
Unsurprisingly, even a short trip to Everglades National Park yielded the longest confirmed species list I’ve yet compiled in a National Park. We certainly spotted more species than those listed here, particularly trees and insects. Nevertheless, the following are the identifications I am confident in.
BIRDS
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Our final stop in Everglades National Park was Mahogany Hammock, a hardwood hammock or island of dense trees and vegetation rising inches above the sawgrass prairie. It was the afternoon of Sunday, April 12, and our two-day visit to the Everglades was coming to its end.
Beyond the opportunity to visit a hammock ecosystem, we were attracted to this particular hammock because it boasts the largest Mahogany tree in the United States. The hammocks are areas of higher ground that are not flooded in the wet season. They are able to support an array of trees and plants are feel dense and jungle-like.
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After our boat tour of the Everglades backcountry on Sunday, April 12, it was time to say goodbye to Flamingo at the end of the park road and begin the journey back to Lake Ashton. Although it was early afternoon, none of us was particularly hungry. So instead of grabbing a bite at Buttonwood Cafe, we began the drive, knowing that we’d stop at least a few times before we left the park.
The first stop, not far from Flamingo, was small Mrazek Pond, visible from the road with an area to pull over and park. We’d noticed the pond and that it boasted bird life on the way to Flamingo the previous afternoon. Now we were going to have a look.
It was late morning on Sunday, April 12. After visiting Anhinga Trail and Pa-Hay-Okee Overlook, my parents, Sean, and I were on the pontoon boat, The Sawfish, waiting to depart Flamingo Marina for the concessionaire-operated Backcountry Tour of Everglades National Park.
The tour would give us just a taste of the Park’s vast mangrove estuaries, where the freshwater of the Everglades spills into the saltwater of the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay, creating a fertile nursery for fish, invertebrates, reptiles, and birds. The tour travels the first ten miles of the ninety-nine-mile Wilderness Waterway, a marked paddling trail that stretches from Flamingo to Everglades City.
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There are no other Everglades in the world.
They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in their simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.
-Marjory Stoneman Douglas, 1947
Everglades National Park was established in 1947 and protects more than 1.5-million acres of sawgrass prairie, mangrove estuaries, pine rocklands, hardwood hammocks, and Florida Bay. It was the first National Park created specifically for wildlife, to save a threatened ecosystem. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an International Biosphere Reserve.
Yet for all that, it is one of the most threatened landscapes on the continent.
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Sunday, April 12, Sean, my parents, and I woke up at 6am at our hotel in Homestead. We wanted to get an early start to be able to see much along Everglades National Park’s scenic drive before we had to be in Flamingo for our 11am backcountry boat tour. Our first stop that morning would be Anhinga Trail, not far from the Park entrance in a section of the Park that had been a Florida State Park before the National Park was established. The trail was highly recommended by my Openlands coworker and friend, Linda, as well as by various guides.
With four of us sharing one bathroom, it took a bit of time for everyone to be ready. We breakfasted in the hotel bistro before checking out.
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We had tickets for the sunset tour of Florida Bay on Saturday evening, April 11 at 6pm. From our hotel in Homestead, the park entrance was about a twenty-minute drive. Flamingo, where the marina was located, was another thirty-eight miles away at the end of the park road. We didn’t want to be late, so after we’d dropped our bags at the hotel, used the restroom, and refilled our water bottles, we set out toward Everglades National Park.
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Our journey to Everglades National Park began on Saturday, April 11 at Lake Ashton, the retirement community my parents were renting a house in for March and April. Sean and I had flown from Chicago after work on Thursday. Friday evening we’d spent packing for the Everglades and preparing a picnic lunch for Saturday afternoon.
Our first destination was Big Cypress National Preserve, which protects 729,000 acres of the northwestern section of the Everglades ecosystem. Because of the habitat diversity in the Preserve, it is critical for the endangered Florida Panther. Some 30-40 panthers live in the Preserve, compared with 8-10 in Everglades National Park. Although it was part of the original proposal for the National Park, the Big Cypress Swamp was ultimately not included in the Park when it was established in 1947. Two major east-west thoroughfares bisect the Preserve, I-75 (nicknamed Alligator Alley) and US 41 Tamiami Trail.
In the decade after Everglades National Park was established, developers from booming Miami proposed and began building the world’s largest jetport on Tamiami Trail near the center of the swamp. The developers had not anticipated the evolution in public understanding of the importance of protecting open space, wildlife, and water in south Florida. The outcry from conservationists and the general public was intense, leading to the cancellation of the jetport and the creation of the nation’s first National Preserve.
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My parents rented a house in central Florida for March and April 2015. This was the third year they’d spend part of the winter there to escape somewhat the cold and snow of Michigan. For the second year, Sean and I were to visit them for a long weekend. In 2014, we’d stayed four nights, but this year we’d decided to stay for five. The previous year, we’d made some day trip excursions to Bok Tower Gardens, near to Lake Wales, where the senior development they rented in was located. We also, with my Mother, ventured an hour away to the Atlantic coast and Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge. And Sean and I drove the hour and change to the Gulf and Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge to see manatees.
This year, since we were staying longer, I thought I might be able to convince everyone to do one of the three Florida National Parks. Dry Tortugas was both too far away and already claimed as a trip by others. Everglades seemed to big. So my initial focus was on Biscayne, south of Miami. As I began investigating Biscayne, I discovered that the park currently has no contracted concessionaire to provide visitor services. So we wouldn’t be able to take a glass-bottomed boat tour. Or get out onto the water of an almost all-water park.
By default, then, the 1.5-million acre Everglades National Park at the southern tip of the Florida Peninsula would become my fourteenth park, Sean’s twelfth park, and the first National Park I’d visit with my parents.
It was the evening of Saturday, September 13, 2014, and Sean and I were back in camp after a great eleven-plus-mile hike through the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
No rest for the weary, though, while Sean started supper, I began to pack up. We still had one more night in camp, but the more we prepped to convert our packs to checked and carry-on bags, the less we’d have to do in the morning. I hoped to hit the road at 6am, so that we’d not be rushed on our nine-hour drive to Sioux Falls for our 6:05pm flight. Neither of us wanted a repeat of the sprint to the airport we’d experienced leaving Big Bend.
We still had a touch of wiper fluid left in the bottle we’d purchased back in South Dakota when it had been so snowy. I figured we’d used enough that I could top off the chamber. I walked around to the front of the Jeep and opened the hood. I was greeted by a small face as surprised as I was. It twitched its whiskers excitedly and then slipped behind the engine.
“Sean,” I cried, “bring a camera!”
The tiny face worked its whiskers and nose and then dove deeper behind the engine into the bowels of the Jeep. By the time Sean got there, seconds later, it was nowhere to be seen. Neither of us had seen it scamper from the Jeep, but we hoped that it would be gone by the morning.
The face belonged to a Bushy-Tailed Woodrat, the original packrat, which was beginning to build a nest on top of the Jeep’s engine. And I swear it was blue. I’m sure it was really blue-gray, but in the light and the surprise, it felt as blue as a mouse from Voltron.
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Sean and I awoke in our tent in Juniper Campground in the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It was Saturday, September 13, our last full day in the Dakotas. The journey through three National Parks, two National Monuments and a National Memorial Park had been glorious, but had involved a great deal of time behind the wheel of our rented Jeep. This would be a day of hiking. I said to Sean, “I want to walk out of this campground, have an adventure, and walk back in.”
It had been another freezing night, but the sun was already warming us from the outside while strong percolator coffee warmed us from within. The camper nearest us, a fellow camping alone in a huge tent a few sites away, had already packed up and moved on, so we had the northern end of the campground to ourselves.
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Friday, September 12 had been an immense day, from waking up to hoarfrost and a moving conversation to lunching at the “cradle of conservation” to plunging into the awful heart of a latter-day gold rush.
But now we had reached the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where our journey through the Dakotas would conclude.
Immediately, the North Unit felt different from the South Unit, although we were still in the Badlands of the Little Missouri River. Half of this unit is federally designated wilderness. Through most of its course, the Little Missouri flows north. But here in this smaller unit (slightly more than half the size of the South Unit), the landscape is oriented around a great turn in the river as it meanders east. In the South Unit, the river is incidental, flowing through the western section of the Badlands. In the North Unit, the river is the centerpiece, carving a great, tantalizing valley out of bluffs and prairie.
At the Little Missouri in the North Unit, in one very particular way, the continent cleaves itself in half. Here the north bank of the river marks the Central Time Zone, while the south bank marks Mountain Time.
In we drove. Our intention was to select at campsite at Juniper Campground, set up camp, and then take the scenic drive, a one-way road instead of a loop. The end of the road was Oxbow Overlook, where the river makes its elegant turn. That would be a perfect place to catch the sunset. The other reason I wanted to hit the scenic drive that evening was that I had grown tired of being in the Jeep. I wanted the following day, Saturday, our last full day of the trip, to involve no car travel whatsoever. As I put it to Sean: “Tomorrow I want to walk out of camp, have an adventure, and walk back into camp.”
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Where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question shall always be answered from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.
– Gifford Pinchot, Chief Forester of the United States, 1905
Most people are on the world, not in it — have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.
– John Muir, July 1890
It was the afternoon of Friday, September 12. After our picnic at the site of Theodore Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch, the “Walden Pond of the West,” as it has been called, Sean and I were keen to continue on to the final destination of our journey through the Dakotas, the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
From the Elkhorn, we drove west up the bluffs and back into the the Little Missouri National Grassland, administered by the Forest Service under the “multiple use doctrine” advanced by Gifford Pinchot, its first chief. Pinchot also successfully advocated moving the National Forests from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture so that they could be managed as a commodity. While commercial drilling for shale oil is prohibited in National Parks, National Forests, including the Little Missouri National Grassland, are exempted from such prohibitions. Many of the oil wells encroaching on Theodore Roosevelt National Park are on land administered by the Forest Service.
The image above is both particular in that it is literally on the doorstep of Elkhorn Ranch and also generally representative of the wearily monotonous pump jacks and burn-off plumes found throughout the oil patch of the Bakken. Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the Little Missouri National Grassland that surround it sit atop a vast oil reserve known as the Bakken shale deposit for the farmer on whose land oil was first discovered in the 1950s.
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Late Friday morning, September 12, we headed out from Medora under a glorious North Dakota sky to the Park’s Elkhorn Ranch Unit, site of Theodore Roosevelt’s primary ranch during his time in the Badlands. Our intention was to make the drive out, eat a picnic lunch, and then continue on along the Forest Service roads of the Little Missouri National Grassland to the North Unit. Handsome Ranger Michael had recommended that a picnic was the perfect way to experience the solitude of the Elkhorn
Since Roosevelt’s first arrival in Dakota Territory and enthusiastic purchase of the Maltese Cross Ranch south of Medora in September 1883, his world had been shattered. Days after the birth of his baby daughter, both Roosevelt’s beautiful young wife, Alice, and his mother died of unrelated illnesses in the same house on the same night, Valentine’s Day 1884. The young New York State Assemblyman was devastated. “The light has gone out of my life,” he wrote in his journal. He withdrew from the social life of New York City he had enjoyed with Alice and shifted his attentions resolutely toward the Dakotas.
In the summer of 1884, Roosevelt decided to look for a suitable site for a second ranch, one that boasted more solitude than the Maltese Cross, which was both near Medora and on a much-used trail. He found the perfect spot on some bottom land hemmed in by bluffs with the Little Missouri River running through it. About thirty miles north of Medora, it was secluded enough to afford Roosevelt his much-desired privacy, but also close enough to Medora to allow him eventually to serve as president of the local cattlemen’s association.
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Refreshed by our lunch, we discussed what to do next. It was Thursday, September 11. We had an afternoon and a morning left in the South Unit before heading to the North Unit the following afternoon. We also wanted to see Elkhorn Ranch. We decided to save the ranch for the next day, planning to visit it on the way to the North Unit. For the afternoon, we’d hike to the park’s petrified forest out in the western portion of the South Unit.
We stopped at the C-Store. Virtually every time we were in Medora we stopped at the C-Store. I believe that this was the time we discovered Dot’s Pretzels, locally made seasoned pretzel rods. The fellow who works at the C-Store who is originally from Eugene, Oregon, recommended them to us.
To get to the petrified forest, we would have to hike through the South Unit’s designated wilderness. We had two options: ford the Little Missouri River at the campground and climb the bluffs or drive out of the park and into the Little Missouri National Grassland, starting the hike at the park’s western boundary. Since the Little Missouri was obviously high, there was really no choice.
We got on I-94 and headed west, following the park’s southern boundary. Along the freeway’s embankment, we saw silver sage growing. Now that we knew what it was, we began looking for a spot that we could gather some.
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After spending the morning of Thursday, September 11 driving and hiking around the South Unit, Sean and I drove into Medora for lunch. On our way out of the park, we stopped at the Visitor Center, mostly to use the restroom, but also to have a look around.
While we were browsing in the bookstore, a ranger called that a tour was about to begin of the Maltese Cross Cabin. At first we ignored the call as a group of about a dozen visitors gathered around the ranger. We figured that we’d check out the cabin later after lunch.
The ranger began to give his talk there in the center, and we listened in as we continued to look at patches and pins and postcards. He briefly covered Theodore Roosevelt’s early life in New York and at Harvard before diving into the young man’s experiences in the Badlands, the incredulous reaction the locals had of him as a “New York dude,” and his motivations for heading west.
When Roosevelt first arrived in the Badlands in September 1883, his goal was little more than to hunt bison before they were extinct. But this was far from Roosevelt’s first foray into the wilderness. He’d been hunting in Minnesota and the far eastern edge of Dakota Territory a couple years earlier with his brother. More substantially, he’d spent a series of trips in the backwoods of Maine, developing an abiding love of the outdoors.
The ranger, whose name was Michael, asked his audience about their motivations in coming to Theodore Roosevelt National Park that afternoon. Sean and I were the only ones who, although not part of the audience proper, raised their hands when Ranger Michael broached the restorative power of nature. He encouraged us to join the tour, which we did.
The morning after he arrived in Little Missouri, Roosevelt engaged a reluctant Canadian, Joe Ferris, to guide him on a bison hunt. Bison had been so overhunted that Ferris was doubtful they’d even see one, but Roosevelt was persuasive. Ferris outfitted a buckboard, and the pair headed some seven miles south from Little Missouri (and the newly sprung-up rival town of Medora) through the Badlands toward a small ranch overseen by two other Canadians, Joe’s brother Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield.
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The second half of our tour of Theodore Roosevelt National Park South Unit’s loop road comprised two short nature hikes: Coal Vein Trail and Ridgeline Nature Trail. Throughout the park, we found the interpretive brochures consistently well-stocked, well-written, and informative. Kudos to the park staff and volunteers. Sean delighted in reading the brochures aloud in his radio voice.
The sky had grown insistently moody by the time we reached the parking lot for Coal Vein Trail, a 0.8-mile loop in the western part of the South Unit. It was here that a coal vein slowly burned for twenty-six years (1951-1977). While it has been out slightly longer than I have been alive, the evidence is captured in the rock, and the vein is clearly visible at points along the trail.
Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him. The landscape seems always the same, and after the traveler has plodded on for miles and miles he gets to feel as if the distance was indeed boundless. As far as the eye can see there is no break; either the prairie stretches out into perfectly level flats, or else there are gentle, rolling slopes, whose crests mark the divide between the drainage systems of the different creeks; and when one of these is ascended, immediately another precisely like it takes its place in the distance, and so roll succeeds roll in a succession as interminable as that of the waves of the ocean.
– Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
At more than 46,000 acres, the South Unit is the largest of the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It lies immediately north of the town of Medora and I-94 and is therefore by far the most visited of the three. A 36-mile scenic loop road allows motorists from the interstate to easily take in the sites, grab a bite or some gas in Medora, and be on their way across the continent. The loop road was the first thing on our agenda after breakfast on Thursday, September 11.
On September 8, 1883, twenty-four-year-old Theodore Roosevelt traveled from his New York home to the Little Missouri badlands of western Dakota Territory so that he could hunt a buffalo before they were extinguished from the Great Plains. He arrived in the middle of the night at the depot in Little Missouri near the Montana border. Exhausted, he found lodging on a cot in a bunkhouse hotel near the tracks. Next morning, the young Harvard grad, up-and-coming in the New York legislature, whose wife back east was expecting their first child, would hire a local guide and set out on what he would later term “the romance of my life.”
On September 10, 2014, after Sean and I completed our hike at Devils Tower National Monument, we were ready to head to North Dakota for the second half of our Dakotas adventure. We did, however, need to make a brief pit stop back in Rapid City. Sean had inadvertently purchased two tops and no bottoms for his new long underwear (necessary since the temperatures in western North Dakota were expected to dip into the 30s and the region was under a frost advisory). So back we went to Rapid City.
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In 1906, Congress passed the Antiquities Act, which allowed the president to create National Monuments, as opposed to National Parks, which could only be created by Congress. The act was intended to allow for quick protection of land, particularly to allow the government to protect archeological sites that were being looted by pot hunters. It was the second step, after the invention of National Parks, in the creation of a system that would still not have its own managing agency until the Park Service would be created ten years later in 1916. Concerning restrictions on the use of land, it was also the second step in a series of protections that would culminate in the Wilderness Act in 1964.
The Antiquities Act was also a bold expansion of executive powers concerning the removal of land from private or “wise use” (e.g., National Forests) enterprises. President Theodore Roosevelt, who signed the Antiquities Act into law on June 8, was not shy about using it. Roosevelt would ultimately declare fifty National Monuments, six of which (including Grand Canyon, Pinnacles, and Olympic) would later be upgraded to National Parks. The presidential power embedded in the Antiquities Act remains controversial, with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives within the past two years voting to hobble the act by making National Monuments subject to congressional approval.
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My feelings about Mount Rushmore are best captured in four objects: a poem, a playlist, a video, and a set of images.
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After we departed Wind Cave National Park, we entered Custer State Park. Founded in 1912 in part by the efforts of Peter Norbeck, who would be so instrumental in the creation of Badlands National Monument, the park now comprises 71,000 acres of the Black Hills. Our destination was the Cathedral Spires formation in the northwest corner of the park, deep in the granite heart of the Black Hills.
Immediately upon entering Custer, we were stopped by road construction and had to wait for a leader car, just as we’d done adjacent to Jewel Cave National Monument.
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Next morning dawned overcast. It was our final morning at Wind Cave National Park, and we intended to get one more short hike in before continuing on our adventures.
We were still trepidatious about the changing weather. It was Tuesday, September 9, and the forecast for the Black Hills the next day was possible snow, while in North Dakota, our ultimate destination, the temperatures were forecasted to drop precipitously.
We broke camp at Elk Mountain Campground and carefully organized the Jeep for a day of in-and-out sightseeing and day hikes. We drove down to the visitor center to see if they were able to recycle our first empty can of backpacking stove fuel. It was Ranger Madison, who had led our tour the previous morning, who was at the desk. She asked if we’d camped in the backcountry. We said no, but that we were on a ten-day trip and hoped to backpack at least once. We chatted about the impending bad weather, and she said that at least that morning, the temperatures weren’t supposed to drop as much as had previously been thought. This did not change our plans of stopping at the Scheel’s in Rapid City later in the day to augment our gear. Ultimately, the park did not have a way to recycle our canister. Ranger Madison mentioned that the VFW hall in Hot Springs did, but it was entirely the wrong direction for us. We decided to hang onto the canister until we got another chance.
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