We had debated for quite a while whether the trip over to North Dakota was worth a 3 day drive. In the end, we decided it was, because we’d never spent any time there, and although there doesn’t seem to be all that much of interest, there IS a national Park.
Unfortunately the drive there was not uneventful. Driving down the highway we heard a loud popping noise. We both froze, listening and watching, to figure out what happened. The truck was still running and the trailer was still where it should be. About 5 seconds later, Paul- I am always thankful that he is so technically inclined- said “ we blew a hose”. There was no shoulder and nowhere to pull off. I looked on google map and found a pull off 4 miles ahead. Luckily it wasn’t so serious that we couldn’t make it that far.
Sure enough, the cold side Turbo something or other hose was not only disconnected, it was broken. A bunch of duct tape later, we were able to continue on our way to the nearest town with a decent RV park. Finding a new hose was not a piece of cake. There are 15,000 of them on back order with Ford. NO one had one. Realizing it wasn’t going to be a quick fix, I canceled our reservations for the next few days.
We (he) finally found one, but when we called to see if they would overnight it, it turns out they didn’t actually have one- but he actually emailed us later in the day to tell us that his competitor does have one in stock. We didn’t care for the price and it wasn’t the exact hose we needed but it took 3 days just to find that one, so we had them overnight it. We still ended up spending 5 days in the little town of Glasgow Montana dealing with all this.
The upside for me was that the RV park was part of a motel, and there was an indoor pool, suitable for swimming laps, hooray!
Because the truck was still usable, we were able to do some food shopping and even went out to eat one night. Once we knew the part was on its way, we went off exploring for a day. The only thing of interest that we could find was the Fort Peck Dam.
As seems to be the case everywhere we go this summer, Lewis and Clark came thru this area on their famous expedition. At that time, this was just the Missouri River, but the dam was built in the 1930s, creating Fort Peck Lake, the 5th largest man made lake in the U.S.
Once the new hose was installed, we were on our way to North Dakota.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park has 3 sections- we explored two of them. This park was created in the 1940s to commemorate all that Teddy Roosevelt did for conservationism. In fact, while president, he was responsible for creating The U.S. Forest Service, 18 national monuments, 5 national parks, and 150 national forests- 230 million acres of land.
These badlands were where Roosevelt had his ranch- and the peacefulness he felt here is partly what inspired him to conserve so many wild areas for future generations.
The south section of the park was full of wildlife- from adorable prairie dogs to feral horses.
If you’ve never seen what a prairie dog town looks like- this is it.
A field of holes. Usually prairie dogs are standing watch just outside their homes, but there are not many predators here, so they seem more comfortable without the lookouts.
Bison are prevalent here too, as we discovered when we got stuck in a bison jam.
It doesn’t bother me when people stop briefly in the middle of the road to take a picture, but it annoys me when they essentially park there for 10 minutes, blocking traffic.
At least I got a couple of decent pictures myself.
The north section is an hour away and deserved an entire day of exploring. Although there is wildlife here as well, we were focused on the hiking.
We chose a 4 mile trail – Caprock Coulee- which turned out to be an excellent choice.
The first half mile was an interpretive nature trail. There are two types of erosion at work in the badlands- rivulet erosion, which you can see-the channels in the stone are created by rain. The other is differential erosion. The under layer erodes away but the rock that creates the cap is harder and doesn’t erode as fast.
The rest of the trail was just fun- with great views and some interesting rock formations to hike on.
