What's Bad About This Land?

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

Looking at a map we noticed that there is a national park just off the interstate in western North Dakota. Neither of us had heard of the park and weren’t expecting what we found here. This place is beautiful. The locals call this are the Badlands. Who knew there was so much "bad land" in the Dakotas. We visited the Badlands in South Dakota several years ago, but didn’t know there was more of this land in the north.

Whoever decided to call the area "Badlands" was quite mistaken. I’d call it painted mountains. The mountains here are ringed in all shades of yellow, red, grey, blue, and black. Green trees add more to the color. The black rings are coal veins. The red rings are burnt coal. Thank goodness this was made into a national park. If not, surely these hills would have been mined many years ago.

The other great feature of this park is the wildlife. Bison are everywhere, and they like to stand near the side of the road. You can drive right by them and nearly touch them from your car window. Praire dogs towns are very near our campground, so we see these little guys scramble every time we drive by. When Adolfo got out of the car to take a close up shot, one of the praire dogs got up on his hind legs and started barking. I decided he was the praire dog town crier.

Deer don’t seem to be as comfortable with humans as the buffalo and praire dogs, but they are all over and we have seen several groups. I was surprised that the area also has a large number of wild horses. Some stand regally at the top of mountains to look over the valleys below. One group had a small colt that gave us a show when we approached. It started jumping and running! Other animals we’ve seen are elk, a beaver, and plenty of birds.