The bison had the trail before we did
Half a mile into Buckhorn Trail in the North Unit, the trail had bison on it. Not near it. On it, grazing across the packed dirt where the path goes, close enough that we could hear them tearing grass. We stood there a minute deciding whether half a mile counted as a hike yet, decided it did, and turned around. You do not get to vote when a herd is in the road.
Three days earlier we’d come off the Little Missouri National Grassland outside Medora, two nights boondocked with no hookups and no neighbor close enough to hear. Both nights I got up around one in the morning, once Big and Little were asleep, and stood on a rise above the van. The second night a satellite went over low and steady, no blink to it, and I watched it the whole way across before it dropped behind the ridge. That was the whole event.
In the South Unit the next morning, Erika had us at the visitor center for junior ranger packets before the gate traffic built, and we drove the 36-mile Scenic Loop with the windows down. A band of feral horses crossed thirty yards ahead of the van and didn’t hurry about it, the lead mare stopping twice to look at us before the rest went by. Little drew prairie dogs the whole ride back to camp, no two the same shape.
The next day we went out on Wind Canyon Trail with Cameron, a ranger intern still working toward his badge. It’s short and flat, and then it drops you at a rim over a fold of badlands with the Little Missouri cutting the bottom of it. He pointed at the far canyon wall and said a family of great horned owls nests in the hollows over there, though nobody in our group spotted one, and that prairie rattlesnakes live in the grass we were standing in, which everybody suddenly noticed we were standing in. Big, who wants to be a herpetologist when this whole trip is over, said that was the best thing anyone had told him all week, and went over the line word for word the rest of the afternoon. This was Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara ground before it was anyone’s badlands to look at, and the MHA Nation governs the Fort Berthold Reservation north and east of here. Then Cameron pointed down at the rim rock itself: the red cap on the buttes is clinker, baked hard by underground coal seams that burned for who knows how long before the wet clay slopes under it wore away. It is why the badlands look soft where you’d expect hard and hard where you’d expect soft.
We had tickets for the new presidential library that same afternoon and did not use them the way we meant to. Big’s stomach had been wrong since breakfast, and neither Erika nor I wanted to find out how that went four rooms deep in a museum. We switched the tickets and started back across the grounds toward the van so he could lie down. Out on the rim the boardwalk deck opens in places and netting is stretched across the gap, so you can lie out over the drainage with nothing under you but the net and a good deal of air. We stopped there on the way. All four of us were up in it a while before we walked the rest of the way to the van and drove back to camp with the windows down.
We had walked something under five percent of the Buckhorn, which is an 11.4-mile loop, and the herd had the rest of it, so we drove up the road to the Caprock Coulee trailhead and took the nature trail there instead, up a draw and out onto a bench above the river. The clay on that slope is pale gray and soft enough to thumb, and the ground below it is littered with dark nodules that weathered out of it, ironstone, iron that dissolved out of the clay and set up hard somewhere else. After the hike, we drove south toward Medora.
On the way we stopped to see the iron concretion “cannonballs” and the North Unit visitor center.
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened on July 4, 2026, which is both Independence Day and the country’s 250th birthday, and nobody involved was being subtle about the timing. It sits on a butte above town, designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, and from the road it does not read as a building so much as a piece of ground that has lifted at one end. The roof is planted in prairie grass and you walk on it. The structure is mass timber, which means the beams and the roof panels are engineered wood rather than steel, and inside the entry the ceiling is close and wooden and smells like a lumberyard on a warm day. The counters where they hand you your ticket are cut from a copper beech that came down at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt’s house on Long Island, after more than 120 years of standing there.
At the door they give everyone a wristband. The system is called Trailblazer, and it is RFID, the same technology as a hotel key card. You stop at a kiosk, it takes your picture, and then for the rest of the building you tap the band at each exhibit and the screens keep track of what you chose and what you lingered on, building a version of Roosevelt’s life shaped by your own route through it. Big worked this out faster than I did and then spent the rest of the visit testing it. He wanted to know what the building decided about you if you skipped a room on purpose, and then skipped one to find out, and then wanted to know whether the machine could tell the difference between a person who skipped it and a person who never got there. I did not have an answer. He tapped his band on the last reader with the look of somebody who suspects he has been graded.
Out back, at the hour when the badlands go from tan to orange, Erika lay down in the netting with her boots crossed and did not get up for a while. You can see a long way west from there, across the valley toward the park, which I assume is the entire point of putting the thing on top of a butte.
Dinner was on another bluff, at the Pitchfork Steak Fondue up at Tjaden Terrace, which is run by the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation that runs the musical and most of what else happens in this town after five o’clock. The name is exact. Steaks go on the tines of a pitchfork, a dozen or so at a time, and a man lowers the whole fork into a barrel of oil over a propane burner, and a few minutes later the fork comes back out and the steaks come off onto a tray. I would like to know who was standing in this town on which afternoon, holding a pitchfork and looking at a barrel of hot oil, when the two ideas met. Then you go through a cafeteria line with a metal tray, solid enough to double as a shield, and get beans and a baked potato and coleslaw and garlic toast, and you carry it to a picnic table on the edge of the bluff with the town laid out below and the buttes behind it. The steak is a full New York strip. I finished mine and helped Little with hers. Two others went back to the van in foil and were breakfast.
Then the Medora Musical, in the Burning Hills Amphitheatre, outdoors, seats cut into the hillside facing west so the sky does part of the show. This is its 62nd season. It is a revue, not a musical in the Broadway sense: a house band, dancers, a run of numbers about the cattle years and Roosevelt and the flag, a comedian between sets, and at one point a horse walks out on stage and does its job. The history in it is the version where nothing went wrong. It is built for a kid in the fourth row, and there were a great many kids in the fourth row, and they were loud in the right places. The cattle years it sings about began after the bison were shot off these plains and after the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara had their land cut away around them, three times, into what is now Fort Berthold. Neither of those is in the show. I went back to watching the horse.
Partway through, the cast called every kid in the amphitheater down onto the stage to learn a line dance. Big and Little went. From our seats we could see them picking up the steps a beat behind the dancers next to them, catching up, losing it again on the turn. It made the show for us.
The show let out near ten and we drove the four minutes back to camp.
From here we point the van south toward the Black Hills, five hours down to Crazy Horse Memorial and Mount Rushmore.
Where this happened: Theodore Roosevelt National Park