Dakotas deliver national parks with bison, badlands

As my husband steered our vehicle off the interstate in western North Dakota to follow the signs to the Painted Canyon visitor center at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I said aloud: “I wonder where or if we’ll see any of the bison herd?”

Within a minute he answered, “How about here?”

Three of the enormous creatures greeted us from a pasture just off the visitor center’s parking lot, a few cow pies revealing their path across the asphalt. Unsure whether bison would appear upon request during the rest of our stay in the area, we spent some time watching them from the safety of our vehicle while they meandered with feet of us, grazing on grass and scratching their necks on posts and other objects they came across.

It was a great start to our first visit to North Dakota and a preview of what was to come. We saw thousands of bison near and far during our week-long road trip through the Dakotas.

We built our June 2020 journey around spending time in two typically uncrowded national parks. We covered 2,500 miles, starting with the 900-mile trek from Wichita to Medora, N.D., to see Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Then we moved to western South Dakota to explore Badlands National Park. We spent a final day crossing South Dakota by way of Interstate 90, stopping at sights and then spending the night in Sioux Falls before we headed south for the 500-mile return trip to Wichita.

While the national parks were our main destinations, we also stopped briefly at several other units managed by the National Park Service: Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming and Minuteman Missile National Historic Site and Rushmore National Memorial, both in South Dakota.

These monuments, memorials, historic sites and national parks are among the 423 individual units in all 50 states covering more than 85 million acres that the National Park Service manages. The Park Service, part of the Department of the Interior, is organizing its annual nine-day celebration of America’s National Parks April 17 to April 25. Every national park site will have a free admission day on Saturday, April 17.

The Park Service asks those who are able to visit a park to recreate responsibly, including following rules requiring masks when physical distancing cannot be maintained, and again this year is providing online exploration during National Park Week. Visit nps.gov/npweek or nationalparkweek.org for virtual programming.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park sees about half a million visitors a year, Badlands National Park draws around one million visitors annually. For comparison, of the 63 units with the naming designation “national park,” Great Smoky Mountains National Park had 12.1 million visitors in 2020 and the next highest visitation was 3.8 million entering Yellowstone National Park.

Here’s what to expect if you plan a trip to see neither national park in the Dakotas.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

As the only U.S. national park named after an individual, Theodore Roosevelt National Park honors the president’s contributions to conservation and federal protection of land and wildlife and his connection to the area before he became president.

Roosevelt first came to Dakota territory from New York as a 24-year-old in 1883. He hunted bison and invested in several ranches for a few years, maintaining cattle interests in the badlands until he became the vice president of the United States in 1901 and then assumed the presidency later that year upon the assassination of William McKinley.

President Harry S. Truman established the park in honor of Roosevelt in 1947. It preserves more than 70,000 acres across three separate areas of the Little Missouri Badlands, all carved by the Little Missouri River. North and South units have scenic drives, hiking trails, wildlife viewing and camping. The Elkhorn Ranch Unit is where you’ll find the remaining foundation stones of the cabin Roosevelt called his home ranch.

We spent two nights based in Medora, the town of about 100 residents where you’ll find the south entrance to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. That gave us plenty of time to explore the North and South units, though you could easily fill more days by hiking longer trails or making the drive to the remote Elkhorn Ranch (check road conditions, which sometimes require a high clearance vehicle).

Medora is known for its seasonal musical based on Roosevelt’s time in the Badlands performed at the town’s outdoor amphitheater and the adjacent Pitchfork Steak Fondue experience, owned and operated by the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation. Both operate from June 9 to September 11 this year, with tickets on sale starting April 27.

With just two evenings in the area and the Medora Musical starting at prime sunset viewing time, we skipped the show but got an early seating for the steak dinner – ribeye skewered on a pitchfork and dipped in boiling oil to cook. With a little more than two hours until sunset, we hiked the Painted Canyon Nature Trail from the visitor center where we spotted our first bison and headed farther into the park for the famous sunset view from Wind Canyon Trail.

We were visiting during the pandemic, so visitor centers were closed; this year they are open May through October. Also, the 36-mile scenic loop in the South Unit was closed for road repairs, limiting our ability to explore much of the largest unit of the park. Construction continues this year on four miles of the road, so rather than a loop you now can drive in 24 miles and then return along those same 24 miles.

Thankfully, the entrance road was open for about 10 miles into the park. We did several short hikes to vistas along this section, including one of the most photographed bluff views at Wind Canyon Trail. We watched bison cross the Little Missouri River from a distance, then got back in our vehicle and slowly drove back to Medora while stopping to watch hundreds of bison making their sunset migration that included crossing the paved road.

Because our options were limited in the South Unit, we spent our one full day in the park in the North Unit, about an hour’s drive on the highway from Medora. Before lunch, we drove the entire scenic road (28 miles roundtrip), did an easy 2.4-mile hike at the end of the road that took us across rolling hills to Sperati Point for dramatic views of the river winding through grasslands and rock formations, and stopped at all of the scenic overlooks for photos, bison watching and walking through an area of cannonballs — large, round rocks formed within the sediment layers of the badlands and exposed over the years through erosion.

There are no restaurants within the park, so we drove about 15 miles north of the park entrance to Watford City for a late lunch. We returned to the North Unit to tackle the 4.4-mile Caprock Coulee Loop Trail, rated a moderate hike though it felt harder in a few places. The views were worth the effort; we got up close to several buttes, walked through a densely wooded area then had amazing canyon views on the upper portion of the hike.

We made it back to Medora in time for a quick shower and dinner so that we could drive into the South Unit for our nightly bison viewing. We were also rewarded that night with spotting some of the park’s wild horses on a ridge.

When making plans to visit, keep in mind the tourist season doesn’t kick in until July and is over by September. We appreciated the light traffic on the trails in late June, but it meant we needed to be strategic with meal planning as the few restaurants in Medora have limited hours outside their busy season. Also, note that Medora and the South Unit are on Mountain Time while the North Unit is on Central Time.

Check https://www.nps.gov/thro/ for closures when making plans and during your visit. Last week, two separate fires affected the park, including closing the North Unit.

There are four other NPS sites in North Dakota: Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail and North Country National Scenic Trail.

Badlands National Park

Badlands National Park preserves 244,000 acres in southwestern South Dakota, including the country’s largest, protected mixed-grass prairie. What you notice most, though, are the dramatic buttes, pinnacles and canyons. The multi-layered rock formations gave the area its name: bad lands that were hard to navigate.

The land was named a national monument in 1939, then redesignated a national park in 1978. There are two units: the more trafficked North Unit right off I-90 and the South Unit, which the Park Service co-manages with the Oglala Sioux tribe. That unit was closed during our visit and remains closed due to COVID-19; check https://www.nps.gov/badl for the latest.

Like Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Badlands National Park gives visitors the option of simply driving through to see the spectacular landscape from your vehicle. The 39-mile Badlands Loop Scenic Byway is stunning, but don’t miss the chance to at least see a few of the views afforded by short trails just off the road. The Window Trail is a quarter-mile roundtrip and is fully accessible via a boardwalk, taking you to a picture perfect expansive view of the otherworldly terrain. From the same parking lot, you can access the three-quarter-mile Door Trail and the harder 1.5-mile Notch Trail, along with Castle Trail, the longest in the park at 10 miles.

We stuck to short hikes, including an easy climb on the Cliff Shelf Nature Trail and a more strenuous steep climb on Saddle Pass Trail, both offering sweeping views of the White River Valley and some of the park’s 244,000 acres. We packed our lunch and enjoyed it at a shaded picnic table with canyon wall views.

We originally planned to visit Badlands National Park while staying the night in Rapid City, more than an hour to the west of the park. We changed plans though, and stayed at a motel in the town of Wall, about a 10-minute drive from the park.

I recommend this option as it makes it easier to see sunset, sunrise —or both— inside the park, which should not be missed. We spent about five hours of daylight inside the park, driving the scenic byway from the Northeast entrance to the Pinnacles entrance, a route parallel to I-90. We made the short drive to Wall, checked into our motel and had dinner. We returned through the Pinnacles entrance to watch sunset from overlooks on the park’s western side and to drive the gravel road along the rim of the Badlands Wilderness Area, where we found bison and big horn sheep.

There are six other National Park Service sites in South Dakota: Jewel Cave National Monument, Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail, Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, Missouri National Recreational River, Mount Rushmore National Memorial and Wind Cave National Park.

After spending the night in Wall, we grabbed a sampling of the legendary donuts at Wall Drug Store — a road trip stop that attracts 2 million visitors every year to this town of fewer than 1,000 residents — and set out for the eastern part of the state on our final day before driving back to Wichita. My final tip: Choose the vanilla iced donut.