Tom's National Park Adventure

As I was driving West across North Dakota, I couldn’t help but notice, it looked awful a lot like Kansas. Flat grass land as far as you could see. My GPS was telling me that I was getting close to my destination. I popped up over a hill and everything changed. The flat grass lands were gone, and all I can see were Arroyos, Valleys and Hills. The land itself was multicolored and the grass’s were still there, the more I looked.

As I pulled into the gate at Theodore Roosevelt national Park the Ranger informed me that my campground was 5 miles straight ahead. I was totally unprepared for all the wildlife and changes in the land that I was going to see over that 5 mile stretch of road.

I was totally charged up by the time I got to my campsite. That had to have been the best welcoming committee that I’ve ever had checking into a national park.

I got all set up and met a park Ranger / volunteer who informed me that there was going to be a Ranger talk at 7 o’clock at the amphitheater in the campground.

The whole time we were at the Ranger talk, you could hear the herd of Buffalo in the background grunting. They really can be quite loud. The Ranger fielded all of our questions about the animals and we learned that it was rutting season and that the big bulls were hanging around with the rest of the herd.

I learned last night, that I had been calling these animals by the wrong name my entire life. If you had shown me a picture of these animals, I would’ve looked and said they were buffalo. In fact, they are not. They are Bison. The Ranger made a point to educate us on the difference between the two species. They are not related in any way shape or form.

The French trappers were the ones responsible for labeling Bison as Buffalo’s. They were familiar with other large animals that were big and brown with horns. They were water buffalos. So the trappers thought…. It looks like a buffalo so it must be a buffalo!

I went to bed last night, thinking that this had already been such a successful trip to a national park because I was able to see so many animals!

Little did I know what was in store for me this morning!

Good Morning from Theadore Roosevelt National Park!

I was laying in bed this morning, contemplating what the rest of my day would look like and realized I heard somebody in my camp area! I opened up the back of my truck to see the following:

The big males grunting while following the females was what I had heard and that’s what woke me up. In total, they were probably somewhere between 50 to 60 bison that walked right through and around my campsite! Some of them probably got within 15 to 20 feet of my truck!

I got up, got dressed, hopped in the truck and headed to the visitor center at the gate on the south end of the park.

I was able to get in and get my stamp in my passport and then watch a movie about the park.

As is usually the case, the information from the movie and the information Rangers really helped me learn quite a bit about the park.

The park is named after a pretty incredible person. Theodore Roosevelt was in his early 20s when he came out to this part of the world. He had grown up in an affluent New York family. Before he was even in his 20s, he had already traveled all over the world and was a very well educated man.

Even with all those experiences, he did not consider himself to be a man. He decided that in order to prove to himself and to his family that he was a man, he was going to go out west to the frontier before it disappeared. He took a six day journey on a train to get all the way out to North Dakota and decided that he was going to go out and kill himself a buffalo. He hired a Guide and it took him 15 days and he had to travel into Montana before he finally got his buffalo. He returned back to New York and within a year he had one of the most traumatic days that any person could ever have had. In the same day his young bride died during childbirth and his mother also died from a prolonged illness. These two events crushed him emotionally and he decided to go back out west to heal.

Theodore Roosevelt remained in this area for four years. He owned two different cattle ranches and was in all ways a true cowboy. During the winter of his fourth year as a cattle rancher, he lost over 60% of his herd and both ranches went under. He decided to sell the ranches to his ranch hands. He returned to New York went into the world of Politics. I would say that he was a little more successful in politics than he was as a cattle rancher. Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th president of the United States. He was at the time, the youngest man at the age of 42, to ever become the president of the United States. He took Office after the assassination of William McKinley. He did run for a second term after he completed McKinley‘s first term and was elected for a second term. He served as president for only those two terms. He was also instrumental in the formation of the US Navy. He referred to the time that he spent as a cattle rancher in this area as the most formative time of his life.

He was also responsible for establishing the national Park system as we know it. He was able to get 36 states at the time to form conservation agencies. The time that he spent in the badlands shaped how he looked at our national resources and made him want to protect them.

This area of the Badlands got its name from those famous French rappers again. They referred to this area as the land that was difficult to travel in or otherwise the Badlands. The main thing that caused this area to look the way it does, was erosion overtime of the softer minerals. This left behind the fabulous landscapes that we see now. The little Missouri river is what created all of this.

They have found evidence of human occupation in this land from over 11,000 years ago. One reason why people kept returning to this area was because of the abundance of food sources. The biggest food source would be the bison. There are many different Indian tribes that consider this area to be sacred ground. But up until about 250 years ago, none of the people ever lived here year round. People didn’t live here full-time because this can be one of the most inhospitable places on earth to live in. For example, in the last 12 months, the temperature range went from a high of 110°F during the summer and a low of -70° in the winter that’s a swing of 180°. This is not a fun place to live if you’re not prepared.

While I was in the visitor center gaining all of this knowledge, the weather decided it was time to rain. So my plans of going out and doing several hikes today kind of went right out the window. So I spent the day driving around a 25 mile loop and experiencing some of the beautiful overlooks.

Wild Horses

There are over 200 wild horses in the park, dispersed in different bands. The horses came from many of the ranches in the area that went under during the great depression. They were released to fend for themselves when the ranchers could no longer feed them. The horses we see now are the descendants of those former ranch horses.

Tomorrow morning, I have a time reserved to go and visit the new Theodore Roosevelt presidential library. The library was just opened about a month ago. Hard to believe that it took this long to give this president his own library!