As They Are: Exploring the National Parks

Tag: Dakotas

Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Unit: Saying Farewell to the Dakotas

Image: Sean M. Santos

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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Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Unit: Buckhorn Trail, Caprock Coulee Trail Loop

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.”

Image: Sean M. Santos

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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Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Unit: Sunset at the Oxbow

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.

Image: Sean M. Santos

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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Theodore Roosevelt National Park: Into the Bakken

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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Theodore Roosevelt National Park: Elkhorn Ranch

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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Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit: the Evening and the Morning

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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Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit: The Maltese Cross Cabin

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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Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit: Coal Vein Trail and Ridgeline Nature Trail

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.

Coal vein
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Theodore Roosevelt National Park: South Unit Loop Road

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.

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Detour: Devils Tower National Monument

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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Detour: Mount Rushmore National Memorial

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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Detour: Cathedral Spires

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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Wind Cave National Park: Rankin Ridge Trail

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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Wind Cave National Park: Lookout Point and Centennial Trails Loop

It was Monday afternoon, September 8, and we’d already explored two caves, but the day wasn’t over. We arrived back at our campsite at Elk Mountain Campground just before 4pm, which still gave us plenty of time for an above ground hike at Wind Cave before the sun set at 7:19pm.

The hike we chose was the Lookout Point/Centennial Trail Loop, a four-mile loop that began not too far from the campground up the park road and wound through prairie, forest, and riparian areas.

Eastern Kingbird. Image: Sean M. Santos

We stopped briefly at our campsite to refill our water bladders and prepare for our hike. By about twenty after four we were at the trailhead. We locked the jeep, shouldered our packs, and headed out.
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Wind Cave National Park: Bison Herd

Image: Sean M. Santos

In 1913, ten years after the park was established, American Bison were reintroduced to Wind Cave National Park. In establishing the park in 1903, the intent of Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt was to protect the marvelous boxwork formations of the cave, but as an ancillary benefit, the park protected thousands of acres of mixed grass prairie in the foothills of the Black Hills. This habitat would be ripe for an ambitious bison reintroduction program that would culminate at Wind Cave.

The truly vital importance of the Wind Cave herd was recognized and reinforced only in recent decades as increasingly sophisticated genetic tests have confirmed that the herd is one of the last remaining genetically pure herds on public lands in North America. Most other herds have a certain percentage of genetic material from interbreeding with cattle. Even the herd at Custer State Park, adjacent to Wind Cave along its northern border, is not free of genetic material from cattle. The other pure herds are found at Yellowstone National Park, the Henry Mountains in Utah (reintroduced from the Yellowstone herd), and Elk Island National Park in Alberta, Canada.

The saga of the Wind Cave herd began in 1894, as bison reached a point of near extinction in the American West.
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Detour: Jewel Cave National Monument

Jewel Cave National Monument was established by President Theodore Roosevelt on February 7, 1908 as the nation’s thirteenth National Monument. It was intended to protect what at the time was assumed to be a small, but distinctly beautiful cave. Jewel Cave now stands as the second longest on Earth at over 166 miles of explored passageways.

After our morning tour of Wind Cave, we had planned to do a couple short hikes and then visit Jewel Cave for the 2pm Scenic Tour. The unexpectedly busy tours at Wind Cave (particularly for a Monday after Labor Day) made us a little anxious about getting the tour we wanted that afternoon. (The ultimate plan was to come back to Wind Cave to do some hiking in the late afternoon.) So we started out on the 35-mile drive to Jewel Cave

As our route took us through the town of Custer and into the heart of the Black Hills, we began to see granite outcrops indicative of the center of the Hills.
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Wind Cave National Park: Under the Black Hills

After we’d breakfasted on Monday morning, September 8, we drove the short distance from Elk Mountain Campground to the Wind Cave National Park visitor center. We were hoping to take the 9am Natural Entrance Tour, but we were too close to its starting time. Ranger Andrew sold us the final two tickets for the 9:45am tour. He informed us that there would be a group of middle schoolers on the tour with us, but it should be fine, since there had been others from the same large group on tours the day before without any problems.

As we waited the forty-five minutes for our tour, we watched the twenty-minute park introductory film and explored the exhibitions in the CCC-era visitor center. We also stopped by the bookstore.

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Wind Cave National Park: Into the Black Hills

Wind Cave National Park is possibly the most important little-known park in the entire system. It became the seventh National Park in 1903 when Congress passed legislation, subsequently signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, to protect a small, but beautiful cave in the Black Hills of southwestern South Dakota. (Starting here with Wind Cave, all five park units we’d visit would have some connection or indebtedness to Roosevelt.) It was the first National Park to protect a cave, and it also happened to protect an important transition zone between the mixed grass prairie of the South Dakota plains and the Ponderosa Pine forests of the Black Hills.

The quiet importance of the park would grow. What had been assumed to be a small cave is now known to be the fourth longest and among the oldest in the world. On the surface, a reintroduction program for the American Bison, begun in 1913, has yielded one of the most important, purest herds in the United States. It is a herd vital to reintroduction programs across the prairie.

Yet even many of those who have visited the Badlands or Mount Rushmore haven’t necessarily heard of this unassuming, intensely beautiful park. Perhaps that’s for the best.

Before heading from Badlands National Park to the Black Hills, however, we needed to stop for lunch. And, really, there was only one choice:
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Badlands National Park: The Window and the Door

It was Sunday morning, September 7, and although we had already broken camp at Sage Creek Campground, we weren’t quite finished exploring Badlands National Park. Instead of immediately exiting the park via the west entrance, we drove east on the Loop Road one more time to see a few more sightsnear the eastern entrance of the park that we’d skipped the previous day.

While we’d finished striking camp, we’d noticed some cloud cover moving in. Now on the road it added some drama. Although a few raindrops fell on the windshield, we could see that it wouldn’t last. (Note the Black Hills in the far right along the horizon in the image below.)

Image: Sean M. Santos
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Badlands National Park: Saddle Pass, Castle, Medicine Root Loop Trails

After visiting the Notch, we were ready for more hiking. We drove to the Saddle Pass Trailhead west of the visitor center area on the Loop Road. Saddle Pass Trail was only 0.2 miles, but it climbed directly up the Badlands Wall. Saddle Pass then connected to a relatively flat loop combining a portion of Castle Trail with Medicine Root Loop Trail. Ultimately it would be a 4.5-mile loop hike.

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Badlands National Park: The Notch Trail

After lunch, it was time to finally get out of the car and begin exploring some of the Badlands landscapes close-up. We began with the Notch Trail, a 1.5-mile out and back near the eastern entrance to the park. It begins at a major trailhead parking area for trails both short and long. It is also one of the first stops on the Loop Road for those entering the park from the east. On this Saturday afternoon, September 6, it was busy with retirees, families, and couples of various ages.

The Notch Trail is the most demanding of the three short trails starting at this parking lot. The trail began by winding its way into a wall of Badlands formations to the east.

Slowly, prairie grasses and some small stands of juniper gave way to more barren formations.
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Badlands National Park: Loop Road

The Badlands Loop Road, which is not actually a loop, twists for over twenty-five miles above and below the Badlands Wall, offering an almost overwhelming density of scenic views, both from the windshield and at a series of interpretive overlooks and pullouts. It is a classic example of making the wonders of a park easily accessible to motorists, a philosophy that dominated the Park Service’s thinking in its first half century. On my previous visit, Lisa and I had motored along the road from east to west. This time, Sean and I would take the drive from west to east.

Pinnacles Overlook

After our encounter with the Bighorn Sheep and an additional encounter with a grazing herd of them on the side of the road, which had stopped traffic, we turned right onto the paved Loop Road and stopped at the first overlook.
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Badlands National Park: Bighorn Sheep and Prairie Dogs

Bighorn Sheep

After my bison encounter and after a breakfast of Mountain House Breakfast Skillet (more on this later), we set off for a morning drive on the Badlands Loop Road east to the visitor center and Cedar Pass.

The first twelve miles of the road were unpaved and were a retread of the route we’d driven in on the previous afternoon to get to Sage Creek Campground. These miles were also thick with wildlife, being both less traveled and adjacent to the largest expanse of wilderness. In addition to the plentiful bison, we spotted another pronghorn.

And then we stopped at Roberts Prairie Dog Town.

Black-Tailed Prairie Dog
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Badlands National Park: Bison at Sunrise

I awoke on Saturday, September 6, before sunrise, to the sound of birdsong echoing from either side of the shallow valley of Sage Creek Campground. Brilliant, hearty, melodic birdsong, which I would later realize came from Western Meadowlarks.

Sean was still sleeping, so I carefully rolled out of the tent, put on my boots, and zipped on my hoodie. The temperature had dropped quite a bit overnight.

Sage Creek Campground is situated as a large oval with pit toilets at the north and south ends and most of the tent sites within the middle of the oval. It is almost completely surrounded by the federally-designated Sage Creek Wilderness.
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Badlands National Park: Traveling to a Wilderness Sunset

Although legislation to establish a National Park in the White River Badlands of South Dakota was introduced into Congress by Senator Peter Norbeck in 1909, the measure stalled and was almost destroyed completely by a Park Service in its infancy after 1916. The Badlands would not be declared a National Monument until 1939 and would not become a National Park until November 10, 1978 (two days before I was born).

Badlands National Park would be the first that I would visit for a second time. I’d already spent a cold, exhilarating January afternoon there with my friend Lisa over ten years earlier. That earlier trip anticipated my move from Ann Arbor to Chicago and this one felt that it helped mark my tenth anniversary in the city.

Sean and I took a mid-morning flight on American Eagle to Sioux Falls on Friday, September 5. (The previous evening we’d taken in a fantastic concert by Owen Pallet at the Metro.) The 9:30 – 11:05am timeframe was ultimately civilized, allowing us to wake up at our normal times and to grab breakfast at Frontera Tortas, our O’Hare tradition.
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The Dakotas: Planning

Prairie Sunflowers, Cedar Pass area, Badlands National Park

With the exception of a lovely long weekend in Florida in March with my parents, by Labor Day 2014 Sean and I had not taken a real vacation in 2014. This was due both to the whims and vagaries of his firm and that the summer months are busy at Openlands. (For comparison, by Labor Day 2013, we’d already visited the Virgin Islands, California, and Florida and had driven around the whole of Lake Michigan.) It was past time for a vacation. It was time to sleep in a tent.

We decided upon a trip to the Dakotas (and Wyoming). We’d hit three parks: Badlands, Wind Cave, and Theodore Roosevelt, plus three monuments.

I’d been itching to go to Theodore Roosevelt since reading Edmund Morris’ biography of him two years ago. I’d even thought of visiting the park between my time at Marwen and my time at Openlands.
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