Visitors going to the North Unit are going for the seclusion,” says chief ranger Grant Geis. “Last year we were pushing that 700,000 visitors mark between the two units, and I would guess that 600,000 of the visits were registered in the South Unit. And you can truly get away in the North Unit.
Summer is peak season for the park's 700,000 annual visitors, but even then you'll be all alone on hiking trails in the park's far corners, pondering with the same awe what Lewis and Clark must have experienced when they stumbled on these badlands during their 1805 journey across the continent. Visiting them all is manageable over two or three days. It has no services, and most visitors make it a quick stop. The Elkhorn Ranch Unit - the homesite of Teddy's Roosevelt 1880s cattle ranch - lies in between. The North Unit lies 70 miles away (an 80-minute drive), and while it has services such as a visitor center and a road through the badlands, it receives far fewer visitors. The South Unit lies along Interstate 94, adjacent to the tiny gateway town of Medora (just 112 full-time residents), and serves as the main recreational focus for most visitors, with its scenic driving loop and two dozen trails. The North Dakota Badlands, not to be confused with South Dakota's Badlands National Park, have been cut over eons by the muddy Little Missouri River as it flows north, and the national park comprises three separate units totaling more than 70,447 acres.
“I have always said I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota,” he once noted. “The Bad Lands” he wrote of the area, “grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.” In later years, he credited this landscape as having soothed him after his personal tragedies and set him back on course. In 1884, Roosevelt himself retreated to this wide-open country after his wife, Alice Lee, and his mother, Mittie, died only hours apart. Perhaps no national park has such a split personality from afternoon to evening. Stand atop a butte during the golden hour and the park takes on a whole new hue - and temperament. When the sun goes down, the layers of sedimentary rock come alive in the softer light: black veins of lignite, blue-gray layers of bentonite and rust-colored deposits of scoria.
There are antelope and coyotes, wild horses and bighorn sheep, and you can spot them all with a little patience. Prairie dogs squeak from mounds leading to their underground dens and mule deer bed down on the sides of clay buttes. Bison roam the grassy plains and elk wander along juniper-filled draws.
#Teddy roosevelt national park full#
En español | Theodore Roosevelt National Park, in western North Dakota, is a fitting tribute to the “bully pulpit” president who helped birth America's conservation movement through sheer force of will: It protects an imposing landscape that is, simultaneously, both desolate and full of life.
0 kommentar(er)
