After a quick overnight in Deer Lodge, Montana, our road trip began in earnest in North Dakota at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
President Truman established the park as the Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park in 1947. The North Dakota badlands were very important in Roosevelt’s life, where he took great interest in his ranches and in hunting, and the park memorializes his contributions to the conservation of America’s natural resources.
We stayed in Medora, at the south entrance. Complete with wooden planked sidewalks and ice cream parlors, it was quite the western themed tourist extravaganza. While the Medora Musical is “the rootin’-tootinest, boot-scootinest show in all the west”, we decided to hang at the RV and watch the stars. We also passed on the Pitchfork Steak Fondue and Cowboy Cookout… it was clearly too early in the roadtrip!
The first morning, we dropped Conor off at a point of the Maah Dah Hey trail for a bike ride. The complete trail is 144 miles long, winding through the Little Missouri National Grasslands in North Dakota’s Badlands to form the longest continuous singletrack mountain biking trail in America.
We drove to a point further down the trail and started walking towards where Conor should be coming from. We met a friendly couple who warned us about the large rattlesnakes they encountered on the trail inside the park, so our leisurely walk got quite tense, walking single file in the path’s center!
That afternoon we entered the National Park and drove the Scenic Route Drive. There were a number of short trails to lookout points, allowing us to view the flora and fauna.
The next day, we did a longer hike on the Jones Creek Trail, following the creek through the high open prairie.
Later that day, we also drove out to the Painted Canyon Nature Trail. The canyon can be overlooked from a rest stop on I-94, but we ventured down into the canyon to get close to the rock.
