Onward to Teddy Roosevelt National Park! We are really looking forward to this park – buffalo, prairie dogs and feral horses. Wildflowers and towering buttes in the badlands. There is the much visited South Unit and the more remote, less visited North Unit and we plan to visit both. Our first dry camping experience – this is going to be an adventure!
After leaving Voyageurs National Park we have two one-night stopovers, one in Detroit Lakes Minnesota and one in Mandan, North Dakota before arriving in Medora, North Dakota – home of Teddy Roosevelt National Park. During the last leg of the trip we drive tensely through a ferocious thunderstorm with tornado warnings.
By the time the storm abates, we find ourselves in a different world. The endless great plains have been replaced by colorful hills (buttes in western lingo), we have gained an hour and we were now officially in the Wild West!
We drive into the city of Medora – cute historic town of the western edge of North Dakota, close to the Montana border. The little town is filled with restaurants, shops, some historic buildings. The entrance to the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt is right at the edge of town. We are actually staying in the park at Cottonwood Campground. We check in at the entrance station and drive into the park. We drive up a big hill and see cars pulled over on the side of the road… Prairie dogs! A huge prairie dog town.
We don’t stop because we are attached to the Airstream and just want to get to our campsite and get settled in. We keep driving. We fly right by the left-hand turn down to the campground. Disaster! There is a big loop road that goes through the south unit of the park and we are concerned that there will be no place to turn around and we will have to drive the Airstream through the entire 36-mile loop. There is a small service road we think we can back up into and get turned around. However, we are not yet skilled at backing up. It starts to rain. The backup does not go smoothly. We wave oncoming cars around us. Twenty minutes later we are backed up; at least the rain stops. A few minutes later we are in our campsite at Cottonwood Campground. It’s really just a pull-out off the campground loop road so we simply pull in and level. There are no hook ups so there is nothing to set up. This is our first time with NO hookups. No electric, no water or sewer hook ups. Just us, our tanks and our solar panels.
It’s now about 3 in the afternoon and we drive back down to Medora to the Visitor Center. We stamp our passport book and Elle asks for her junior ranger book. We watch the excellent park documentary. We walk through Teddy Roosevelt’s Maltese Cross cabin that is behind the Visitor Center. We decide to have a quick dinner in Medora and then drive back into the park. The sun has not yet set so we decide to drive the 36-mile Scenic Loop Drive. We see prairie dog towns, filled with chittering little prairie dogs. They scamper about. They are smaller than we expected. All around us, there are towering striped badland buttes in tan, black, red, and blue/grey. And buffalo, lots and lots of buffalo. Some right next to the road. There are lots of lone males but we even come across a group of mothers and calves.
We also see some feral horses in the distance. The sun starts to set and the sky turns pink, purple and dark blue with the buttes outlined against the sky. So beautiful. We simply love this park.
We drive back to the campground and since everyone is still awake we decide to go to the campground ranger program at the campground amphitheater. We get there just as the program is beginning… it’s about the buffalo and buffalo management in the park. Elle is fascinated by the way handlers herd the buffalo into shoots (essentially wooden straight jackets) and give them blood tests for brucellosis. The next morning she is playing the game “buffalo squisher” where a baby buffalo gets put in a shoot for its blood test!
Our second day we spend more time in the South Unit – kicking off the day with a ranger-led hike at the Boicourt Overlook Trail, where we learn about the juniper bushes and other plants, the flowers and the controlled burns that are held in the park.
Next we drive to Buck Hill (a short uphill walk to stupendous views). We see lots of colorful flowers, velvet green hills and striped buttes. Our next stop is Wind Canyon Trail, a half mile loop with views of the Little Missouri River.
We have a quick lunch back at the Airstream and then drive over to the other Visitor Center to hike the 1.1 mile Painted Canyon Nature Trail. This hike takes us down into the colorful badlands. We make record time as there are clouds gathering and rain is predicted – we have no desire to get caught in a thunderstorm.
The next day, we fill Elle up with pancakes in town and then drive an hour away to the North Unit of Teddy Roosevelt. We drive quiet roads, farm fields and also see some drilling going on. A truck in front has a huge tank on the back and suddenly the sprayer lets loose, dousing our poor red truck with some unidentified substance. Ick.
We finally arrive at the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The South Unit was not packed with people but the North Unit is really empty. In the South Unit we were among the buttes; the north unit of Teddy Roosevelt is ringed by buttes; more distant vistas. And it is HOT. We drive through the park, stopping at all the overlooks for photos.
The North Unit has lots of wild flowers in red, purple, pink, orange and yellow. There are very few people around and we have many of the overlooks entirely to ourselves. Then we take a short hot hike on the Little Mo Nature Trail. It is now well past lunch time and all three of us are starving and we only brought a couple of KIND bars to snack on, and they were finished before our hike. There is nowhere anywhere near the North Unit to eat. So we drive back to Dickinson and gulp down a tasty but unhealthy cheeseburger and french fry lunch at McDonalds. Then we decide to explore the Dickinson Dinosaur Museum. What a hidden gem! All sorts of amazing dinosaur fossils and a hands-on volcano exhibit. All three of spent a very engaging hour and a half in this little museum.
We return to the Airstream for our third and last night dry camping in Theodore Roosevelt. We will miss this park. However, we are quite pleased at how well it went. We had plenty of room in the tanks and thanks to our solar panel our battery was staying charged. Our first dry camping experiment was a complete success!