Saturday, August 1, 2010; Williston, ND to Medora, ND

We left the Walmart lot at 11:57 AM because we slept until 10AM from the long drive yesterday. We are on our way to Medora, ND where the northern entrance to Theodore Roosevelt National Park is located. This area is called the Badlands, a deeply eroded barren land with endless seas of grasses, buttes, draws, coulees and canyons. A coulee is a dry water gulch. It is a desolate land full of extremes. The Mandan and Hidasta Indians called it "mako sica" meaning lands bad- not good for anything. They lived east of the park near water. They only came here to hunt buffalo, elk and deer; the land would not support a village and with no available water they couldn't grow anything. It was also very hard to traverse this land. It is covered with multi colored peaks and spires created by erosion that rise up quickly. They receice only 14" of rain a year and that in the form of gully washers and maybe 30" of snow in winter that blows everywhere. The winds are relentless with nthing to block it. There are few sounds here; just the wind, insects buzzing and the ocassional cry of a golden eagle. Being a land of extremes the temperatures extend from -40 degrees to 120 degrees! Not a very hospitable place!
Sixty million years ago the Rockies rose, volcanoes erupted and the ash flowed into the forests and swamps. Now there is lignite there which is evidence of lush life here 60 million years ago. Then the land turned semiarid. The Little Missouri River started in the Black Hills of Wyoming. The French fur trappers were the first Europeans to try to live here. Fort Union was established as a trade station for the trappers and the Indians. The granite boulders (called erratics) here were left from the ice age glaciers. These erratics will just appear out of nowhere. The northern unit of the park is the more rugged of the two.
When Teddy Roosevelt came here in 1883 to bisn hunt he fell in love with the rugged lifestyle of the land. By this time the buffalo were almost extinct; but he saw the possibility of cattle ranching. He bought out an existing ranch, the Maltese Cross Ranch for $14,000 and hired on the original owners to help operate it, and added to it until it became the Elkhorn Ranch. He came for months on end for soul healing when he lost both his mother and his wife on the same day, February 14, 1884.During the extreme winter of 1886 -1887 he lost 1000s of his cattle to starvation and decided it wasn't profitable; but he still loved the land because being such an extreme and forbidding place, it looked like it didn't belong to the earth.
Originally Teddy wanted 2030 square miles for the national park, but the National Park Service didn't want it; the state government didn't want it; so the U.S. Fish and Wildlife finally picked it up in 1946. During the depression the CCC built roads and a camp and they were able to add some land because many people left when they couldn't make a living here. From 1918 to the 1930s Peaceful Valley Ranch was built as a Dude Ranch. In the 1930s the Northern unit was made a park. On April 25, 1947 President Truman made it Teddy Roosevelt National Memorial Park and it included the Southern unit and Elkhorn Ranch. On June 12, 1948, the Northern unit was added. It is the only one of its kind in the world. It was dedicated on June 4, 1949 as a Memorial Park. President Carter on November 10, 1978 made it a National Park and added the Oxbow area (an end of the road) with another 29,920 acres of wilderness to the park under the National Wilderness Preservation Act. It has some very unique flora: cottonwood trees, horsetail, silver sagebrush and fauna. The buffalo have been reintroduced here and are a wild herd. In 1996 they also reintroduced native big horn sheep that had previously been eliminated. Also here are mule deer and white tailed deer, prairie dogs, elk, pronghorns, longhorns, coyotes, bobcats, sharp billed grousse, wild turkeys and golden eagles. Now it totals 70,448 acres, with 110 square miles in 3 sections. In the area called Buck Hill we were able to see 100s of bison in a wild herd grazing way off in the distance where no roads go. Also we saw a wild horse herd far away and later just in front of the car as they crossed the road. Check out the pictures.