50

Today is my 50th birthday. For the first time in a birthday post (there are five more before this), I'm not holding a beer and smiling at the camera. Instead, I'm holding a glass of wine and smiling at the camera because I'm in the Napa Valley in California celebrating my first half-century on the planet before heading north to Portland, Oregon to do some more celebrating. Only this time with beer.

This date was supposed to be the last day of this blog. It won't be. I'm having too much fun and growing and learning too much. I'll get to all of that in a minute or two.

This past year I traveled in many respects less than I have in either of the four prior years. In years one through four, I made at least two trips out of the country and set foot in Europe each of those years. This past year, I traveled abroad just once and I skipped Europe entirely. Some of that was due to timing. I traveled a ton between my 48th and 49th birthdays (including making it to four continents) and so had to save up some time off this past year. Some of it was due to going all in on a two week trip to Africa; I hadn't taken two full weeks off from work in almost seven years.

That doesn't mean that this year wasn't incredible because it certainly was. For a start, we saw a ton of different wildlife; three of my four trips this year were centered around birds and mammals large and small. Only a long weekend in Detroit saved us from a full year of animal-focused trips. We also checked a number of things off my non-existent bucket list, including some things that we didn't even know were on there. Seeing the Big Five in Africa, jumping with the Masai, seeing Denali (even though we didn't really see all of it) and visiting Detroit all fit into this category. That last one's not a typo; Detroit is still on my list. One weekend in the Motor City just isn't enough to do everything I want to see in that city.

On top of all that stuff and so much more that's made it into this blog and plenty of stuff that hasn't, I managed to lay eyes on my favorite building in the world on a seven hour or so layover in Amsterdam on our way back from Africa. It's the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and it's shown in the photograph below. I love this building!

So now what? Well, as I mentioned in paragraph two of this post, I am not stopping. I've already modified the subtitle of this blog from "a 1,827 day project dedicated to broadening my horizons" to "a 1,827 day project dedicated to broadening my horizons that just kept going". I'm also today committing (God willing) to extend this journey for a further five years. No I'm not changing the title of the blog to Ten Years. Get over it.

When I started this blog, I set out a series of goals for personal travel and I completed all of those by age 49 at the latest. It's time for a new set of priorities to measure my success; not that these will cover all the places I'll go, because I don't have a clear vision of the next five years right now. Big picture-wise on my 45th birthday, I'd visited just two continents. Now I'm at five. There are two left, one inhabited (Australia or Oceania, if you prefer) and one is not really (Antarctica). The first commitment I'm making today is to add Oceania (I'm going with political continents, not geographical) to my continents visited list.

The second commitment I'm re-making is to visit the one city in Europe I've thought about visiting more than any other. Five years ago, that place was Barcelona, Spain. Today, it's Cologne, Germany. Enough talking about wanting to drink kölsch and see the cathedral. Go do it!

Closer to home, I'm also committing to complete my quest to visit all 50 states. Right now, I'm at 46 with Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma remaining. I intend to get two of those by driving the length of Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica. That's a trip I've wanted to take for a while but I just keep putting it off. That has to get completed before I turn 55. I have no idea how I get the other two. I'm still searching for what the heck I would even do in Arkansas (although I have some preliminary ideas). I'll figure it out.

Finally, there have to be some wonderlust-type spots on the next five years list. There are. I have to make it to either Easter Island off the coast of Chile (like, waaaaaay off the cost) or Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes. And I absolutely have to, no question about it, no excuses accepted, make my way to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I've wanted to visit that place since I was a sophomore in college which at this point is more than 30 years ago. And that's just way too long to want to go to one place without going.

But enough of the future. Today is day 1,827 of this blog. I made it. And for the next two days I'm kicking back in the Napa Valley and doing absolutely nothing except drinking wine and eating food and enjoying the last day of my five year commitment, and the first day of my next, with the person I love most of all in life. Happy birthday to me!

Oldupai (not a typo) Gorge, Tanzania. Somewhere out there the Leakeys discovered early man.

Giant Roadside Sculptures

What is it about North Dakota and giant sculptures by the sides of their roads? Never thought I'd start a blog post that way but here we are...

Over the Memorial Day weekend this year, we headed out to North Dakota for a couple of nights. I figured three days in some wide open spaces with a little wildlife watching thrown in would be good for me over the long weekend. Plus I'd never been to North Dakota before and you know I'm focused on making it to all 50 states. After landing in Bismarck, I've got 46 in the books and just four to go. No idea how I'm getting Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma but that's a problem for another day.

Our must see list for the long weekend? Covering both parts of Theodore Roosevelt National Park looking for bison, wild horses, prairie dogs and whatever else we could find on four or two or six or no (rattlesnake!) legs and trying to find something cultural that was uniquely North Dakota. While we kept a keen eye out for culinary delicacies like tater tot hot dish and taco in a bag at lunch and dinner times, we made the decision pretty early on to spend the highbrow part of this trip checking out some giant statues of whatever we could find. I'm totally serious. It's a thing there somehow.

The centerpiece of our quest for massive works of folk art or whatever else really big and manmade that we could find by the sides of the roads was the Enchanted Highway, a 34 mile long stretch of road running north-south between Gladstone and Regent in the western part of the state. Since 1991, artist Gary Greff has been erecting huge installations on other people's land (he had permission) as a tribute to things that make life in North Dakota uniquely North Dakotan. And it totally works. Want to understand a little bit more about the state bounded by Minnesota, Montana and South Dakota? Spend an hour and a half or so making your way from Regent to Gladstone and stopping along the way.

Tin Family, Enchanted Highway, 1991.

If you decided to make this pilgrimage of sorts, I'd recommend you start from Regent and head north. That's because if you go that way, you can pick up a brochure at the visitor's center at the south end which tells you a little something about each one of Gary's works along the way. We didn't necessarily plan it that way but that's how it worked out for us. We were headed to the Highway from Medora and we figured why not take the fastest way to get to Regent and go from there. If the fastest way had been riding down 102 Avenue SW (that's the name of the road that is the Enchanted Highway), we'd have seen everything twice, but our navigation app took us across rural North Dakota to get to the starting point. It worked for us.

Make it all the way from start to finish and you'll take in all seven of Gary's sculptures in place which include one devoted to the farmers that drive the economy of much of North Dakota; one tribute to Theodore Roosevelt who made North Dakota his spiritual home; and five others featuring wildlife found in the Peace Garden State, although one of the five is really a nod to the farming community of North Dakota also. They range in age from 27 years old (Tin Family, 1991) to the most recent in 2006 (Fisherman's Dream).

These things are absolutely enormous. Tin Pa of the Tin Family is 45 feet tall and supported by 16 telephone poles (presumably inside his body). He is easily bested by a 51 foot high Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, a 75 foot tall buck jumping over a fence and the entire Geese In Flight sculpture just north of I-94 which is a truly impressive 110 feet tall. Each sculpture is attached to the ground and stabilized by a network of cables and stays. The taller and more surface area in a work of art, the more cables necessary to keep it standing upright.

Teddy Rides Again, Enchanted Highway, 1993.

The Deer Family, Enchanted Highway, 2002.

Seeing all seven pieces in one car ride allows you the chance to compare each work and you can see the technical sophistication increasing as time goes by. Tin Family has zero cables anchoring Tin Pa, Tin Ma and Son; that's because the three family members, constructed primarily from used farming equipment, are standing up by fairly traditional methods, meaning gravity and some sort of long anchorage into the Earth, meaning the telephone poles referenced in the previous paragraph.

The next sculpture north of Tin Family, Teddy Rides Again, is stabilized by a number of cables, but Gary made the standing up part about as easy as he could make it by using well pipe with about zero surface area so there's relatively little to no wind force to resist. I say easy here meaning supporting a 9,000 pound welded work of art that stands five stories tall. You know...easy. It's only when you move on from Teddy Rides Again that you start to understand what Gary has learned along the way and how it's improved what he's made.

By the time you get to Fisherman's Dream, you understand how difficult Gary's later works are just simply to stay erect. The entire assemblage here include seven enormous fish, a variety of plant life and a fisherman in a row boat on a choppy water surface with a 70 foot long rainbow trout on the line. The fish are supported by the reeds and greenery "under the water" and are mostly perforated to allow the wind to pass right through them rather than having them act like sails in the gusts blowing across the very flat landscape. We felt some wind in late May. I can't imagine how forcefully the gales blow during a real storm. No deep foundations and mass in this panorama. It's all skill on the sculptor's part.

Fisherman's Dream, Enchanted Highway, 2006.

Of the seven works, my two favorites are Pheasants On The Prairie (first favorite) and Grasshoppers In The Field (second favorite). Grasshoppers is a series of different sized grasshopper sculptures symbolizing the hardships that famers in the midwest endured to make ends meet for their families. There were infamous grasshopper plagues that descended upon North Dakota in the 1870s and again in the early 1930s. Grasshopper populations are typically kept in check in moist conditions because fungus in the soil destroys the insects' eggs. When there's no rain, there's no limits on these pests and their populations explode. The subsequent swarms generally devour everything they come across. I love the purpose and symbolism of this group of sculptures while also being grateful that I've never had to deal with a real mass of these creatures. 

Pheasants On The Prairie, though, takes the top prize for me because to me it's the most impressive group of constructs along the Highway. The pheasant rooster, hen and chicks are all constructed of wire mesh (to allow the wind to pass through; I'm obsessed with the wind, I know) and painted to resemble real pheasants (albeit 60 foot long ones) which makes them the most colorful of all Gary Greff's works with the probable exception of the Tin Family. The pose of the parents compared to the babies who are busy scarfing down some seed on the ground is perfect. This stop was the most anticipated for me before we got started looking at these things in person and while they are less impressive right up close than they are from a short distance (kind of messy up close), they are still my favorite of the seven. Apparently pheasant hunting is a thing in Dakota.

Grasshoppers In The Field, Enchanted Highway, 1999.

Pheasants On The Prairie, Enchanted Highway, 1996.

The drive all the way along the Enchanted Highway is definitely worth making yourself. These labors of love are complex constructs and there's much that can only be truly checked out by stopping at each one along 102 Avenue SW and getting out of your car and walking around and through these and looking at them from as many different perspectives as you can. It's not difficult to do. There's a good sized parking lot next to each one that will likely seem grossly oversized for the traffic you'll encounter if it is a slow day like it was for us. We saw just two other cars pulled over doing what we were doing in the 90 minutes or so it took us from start to finish.

I've tried to capture each work in pictures for this post which are perhaps less traditional than other photographs I've seen online. In addition to the main sculptures themselves, there are wonderful little details or follies that Greff has added to enhance the experience of visiting in person. These include the stagecoach you can climb aboard in front of Teddy Roosevelt and the geese-themed and wheat sheave-looking fences at the perimeter of Grasshoppers In The Field and Geese In Flight. If you've got kids with you, they can ride the smallest grasshoppers at the Grasshoppers stop or check out the Maze of Enchantment at The Deer Family. The maze works for grown-up kids too, even if it's not especially challenging.

If you make the trip from south to north and have enjoyed stopping off at the first six along the way, get ready for disappointment when you get to Geese In Flight. That's because the owners of the land, who purchased it after Gary had already worked out an indefinite lease with the prior owners, don't feel they need to honor the agreement they inherited when they purchased the property. I can't imagine anyone is doing their land any harm; some people are just out to spoil the fun of others I guess. If you want a good picture of this northernmost sculpture, you'll have to get one from the on or off ramp of I-94.

Geese In Flight, Enchanted Highway, 2001. Photo taken from the on ramp to eastbound I-94.

That's a whole lot of words about the Enchanted Highway. If you can remember all the way at the beginning of this post, I marveled at how giant sculptures were a North Dakota thing. Surely, I'm not basing this opinion on just one dude building stuff out of scrap metal for a 15 or so year period, right?

Trust me, there's a lot more.

Want to see the world's largest buffalo? Head to Jamestown, North Dakota where you'll find one that's 26 feet high. And yes, I'm using "buffalo" because that's what folks in Jamestown call it, even though it really should be a bison.

Like big fish (other than Gary Greff's Fisherman's Dream)? Wahpeton has a 40 foot long catfish and Garrison has a 26 foot long walleye. How about turtles? If those are your thing, you have to  pay a visit to Dunseith and Bottineau, where you'll find a regular turtle and one riding a snowmobile, respectively.

Viking? Pyramid Hill. Horse? Minot. World's largest sandhill crane? Steele. These things are everywhere. It's like an epidemic, only in a good way. I can't think of any place other than the United States where people would dare to do this sort of stuff and it's part of what makes this country so great. I'm not being facetious, here. I love it. Every single one of them.

We didn't make it to any of these other roadside sculptures, although we intended to make it to Steele to see the sandhill crane and would have if Delta had told us an hour or so earlier that we weren't making it out of Bismarck on time that afternoon (or Minneapolis for that matter that night). But I couldn't credibly write a blog post about oversized works of art along the highways of North Dakota and only visit the Enchanted Highway.

Enter Salem Sue.

Salem Sue. All 50 foot long of her. New Salem, North Dakota.

Salem Sue is a cow. A Holstein cow, to be exact. She's 38 feet high, 50 feet long and can been seen for miles each way on your approach to New Salem, North Dakota from the east and west on I-94. She's been keeping watch over New Salem since 1974 when she was erected by the area dairy farmers at the low low price of $40,000. That's about $210,000 or so in today's dollars. I'm telling you: only in America would we find a town with 938 residents spending the equivalent of about a quarter of a million dollars on a 38 foot high cow. I love it.

The history of the Holstein breed of cow is a rich one around New Salem. They were introduced to the area around the turn of the twentieth century and the folks around town got so proud of their particular breed of cow that the local farmers organized in 1908 into the Holstein Circuit, a trade association and traveling show of sorts that was dedicated to the breeding and care of these animals and the milk, cream and butter they provided to the townspeople. The town is so focused on this breed of cattle that their high school teams are called the New Salem Holsteins. That's commitment, folks.

Like the Enchanted Highway, Salem Sue has a sculptor. His name was Dave Oswald. Unlike the Enchanted Highway, there's not much searching for meaning in this statue. Plain and simple, she's a Holstein cow. But she does have a theme song called Ballad of the Holstein, which is apparently set to the tune of "Joy To The World" which no scene along the Enchanted Highway has. You can pick up a copy of this ditty's lyrics and other fun facts about Sue and the town of New Salem at the Tesoro gas station just south of I-94 at Exit 127. Keep going south and hang a right to get to the top of Sue's hill. The view is pretty cool, although it's all pretty much dead flat.

Udder-ly gorgeous view of the North Dakota landscape. Told you it was flat.

The weather was gorgeous when we visited Salem Sue; not so much when we made our way from Tin Family to Geese In Flight. You can't have great weather all the time when you travel, I guess. Ultimately no matter what the weather, I'm a fan of any sort of large roadside sculpture. There's no other country on Earth that does stuff like this quite the way the United States does it. I know there are similar attractions all over America, including some we have passed in the last 18 months near Detroit, Michigan (giant tire) and on the road from Albuquerque to Roswell in New Mexico (giant gunslingers). Maybe I haven't looked hard enough but I don't think I've found a place that offers the variety and scope of these things offered by the State of North Dakota. 

If you're a fan, go. If you don't much care one way or another and are in North Dakota, go anyway. You might find something you love. All I know that I'm not even halfway done with that state's roadside attractions. Curse that Delta flight! Could have had one more if I'd have known earlier. Oh well!

Fence posts lining the drive to Geese In Flight, unfortunately blocked off right now to cars.

Bison Bison

The sign above is wrong. There are no buffalo native to the United States. Just throwing that out there to start this post. We'll come back to that issue, I'm sure. 

In the summer of 2011, I visited Yellowstone National Park. I was hoping to see a bison. Just one. That would have been enough. There turned out to be a lot more than one. I saw my first bison strolling down the road (the bison, not me) near where we entered the park. I had my picture taken in front of the second (or maybe it was the third or fourth) less than an hour later. I saw herds and herds of these animals and by the end of the two days we spent in the Park, I'd seen them pretty much all over. On our way out our car was surrounded by a herd of them which must have been 80 or 100 strong. What I saw was better than one.

Male plains bison top out at around 2,000 pounds. They are the largest land mammal on our continent, besting the male moose by a good 400 pounds. Sure, there are other places in this world that have much larger animals and I've seen plenty of those in the last five years. But if we are talking land mammals in North America, the biggest we got is the bison. And Yellowstone wasn't enough. I still wanted to go see more bison. Time for a trip to North Dakota.

Bison bison. Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Unit.

I know what you are thinking. North Dakota? Really? Yep, really! North Dakota! As of the first of this year, I'd visited 45 of the 50 states. North Dakota was one of the remaining five. And they have a pretty good population of bison at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park just outside of Medora in the western portion of the state. Sounds like an excuse to get away for a long Memorial Day weekend.

Now, if you are thinking about doing this on a three day weekend from the east coast, know that you can't exactly fly commercial very easily into the western part of North Dakota, so either get your own plane or get ready for a longer-than-it-should-really-take type trip. A flight out of National, a connection (with a couple hours wait) somewhere in the midwest (Chicago on the way out there and Minneapolis-St. Paul on the way back), pick up a rental car and then another couple of hours drive from Bismarck to western North Dakota and you are there. Don't think it's worth it? Remember, there are bison involved here. Although I should caution if your flight out of Bismarck is delayed, you might end up in MSP for a night. We did!

The population of bison in the American west isn't what it once was. I think that goes without saying. But in case it doesn't, let me give you some numbers. While certainly nobody counted this many bison at any one time with any degree of precision, it is estimated that between 20 and 30 million once roamed the great plains of North America. They were an essential part of human life for a long time. They were both revered by and hunted for sustenance by the native American tribes in what is now parts of the mid-west and west of the United States.

Then the white man came. Hunting. Habitat destruction. Cattle and equine-borne disease. The railroad. Killing for sport. All of these things decimated the bison populations of the west. Bison hides became fashionable and killing soared to support demand. Dodge City, Kansas was established in the heart of bison country in 1872. Three months after its founding, the town had shipped more than 43,000 hides to the east coast behind a mantra of single shot kills. And by that I mean that apparently if you killed the matriarch of the herd, the rest of the bison stood still and mourned, allowing hunters to kill an entire herd with as many bullets as there were bison. By 1889, we were down to a recorded 1,091 plains bison. 30 million to 1,091 in less than a century.

Today, the bison population is much larger than it was in 1889 and I guess there would be some folks who might declare the recovery of the species as a conservation success story. That is if you can call a reduction from 30 million to about 500,000 total worldwide a success. And of the half a million, just 30,000 are pure bison that haven't been cross-bred with other species. Most of these survivors inhabit National Parks and other lands set aside for public use. The largest herd, about 5,000, is in Yellowstone National Park so it's no wonder we saw so many there in 2011. Theodore Roosevelt National Park has 500 or so total. It's also way smaller than Yellowstone at just 110 square miles as opposed to Yellowstone's almost 3,500 square miles. I felt optimistic about my chances of sightings in North Dakota.

Four bison, presumably male. Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit.

But before we get to all that, let's talk Teddy Roosevelt for a minute shall we? Roosevelt was a New York City-born, Harvard-educated childhood asthmatic who had been a New York State assemblyman by the time he was 24 years old. He would go on to be a New York City Police Commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York, Vice President of the United States and then of course the 26th President of the United States. After his mother and wife died on the same day in 1884, Roosevelt fled the east coast for North Dakota and lived there for two years being a cowboy on his own ranch which he purchased with family money. This all happened between the assemblyman and police commissioner gigs.

While it might seem that Teddy was a rich city boy who just bought his way to cowboy-hood, apparently that was not the case. While he first knew very little about cattle ranching, he worked at it and weathered both the occupation and the Dakota winters for two years, winning respect from those he worked with and around as a consummate outdoorsman. He spent his 1884-1885 stint in Dakota at Elkhorn Ranch, a property he had built for him about 35 miles north of present day Medora. It wasn't the first time Roosevelt had lived in the area. During an earlier winter, he had spent time in a smaller cabin called the Maltese Cross Cabin closer to town. Both cabins still exist in some form. The Maltese Cross Cabin is preserved in full and located next to the National Park main entrance. Elkhorn Ranch is reduced to foundations and is accessible via dirt road near the Park.

That Roosevelt would end up with his name on a National Park is appropriate because history now remembers him as one of the Parks' biggest boosters. His early life, however, suggests that he was anything but interested in preserving the American west. His first trip to North Dakota was a hunting expedition to kill bison, probably before they all disappeared. Not exactly the work of a preservationist. But that trip also made him realize what unrestrained destruction and killing would do to the natural landscapes and animals on our continent. Later on during his time as President, he helped create 23 of the 35 National Parks in existence at the time he left office and he presided over passage of the Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities, which allowed the President without the input of Congress to declare properties in the United States as National Monuments. Ultimately despite a bit of a rocky start, I think Teddy probably earned his National Park.

Dakota Badlands, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Unit.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park is located in the Dakota Badlands, a landscape which today is a topography marked by deep and sudden stone and mud drop-offs topped and interrupted by patches or full plains of grassland. It is a striking and rugged country that is at once both forbidding and gorgeous. Apparently the area was not much valued by native American tribes. The name Badlands is a literal translation from the native tongue of land that is bad, meaning worthless for any useful purpose.

The Park is divided into two parts: the North Unit and the South Unit. We made it to both and both are worth a visit. The South Unit is highlighted by the 36 mile long Scenic Loop Drive along with the Painted Canyon accessible via a separate entrance and miles upon miles of trails, including some that lead to a petrified forest. The North Unit has its own 14 mile long (28 there and back) Scenic Drive with fewer, but of significant length, trails through wilderness areas. Both parts of the Park are home to elk (didn't see), prairie dogs (saw plenty), deer (saw some mule deer), bighorn sheep (tried but came away empty), wolves and coyotes (some sort of grey dog-like thing ran in front of our car), badgers (nope!) and of course bison. Any yes, we did see bison, although I suppose it's fairly obvious based on the pictures you've passed to this point.

We spent a little more than a whole day in the Park, which for us constituted about 12-14 hours or so in total. We concentrated our time on the driving portions of the South and North Units although we did spend a couple of hours making the three mile hike to one of the petrified forest areas in the South Unit which took us over Badlands areas and grassy plains. Traversing that grassland punctuated by bison poop after bison poop on a hoof worn groove in the landscape was probably the one place we were glad we didn't see bison or any other sort of sizable mammal. We didn't make it to Elkhorn Ranch, although we rented an all-wheel drive vehicle that we would need to get there. Considering we'd likely just be looking at the vague outlines of the former foundations, we opted to do the petrified forest hike instead. I can't say I was disappointed with our choice. 

About to charge? He didn't. Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit.

So about those bison. It took us about as long this year to see our first pair as it did for me to see my first one in Yellowstone all those years ago. We stopped off at Painted Canyon as soon as we could right off I-94. They were standing probably about a quarter of a mile away being very bison-like, meaning just standing around and grazing. They were too far away to get a close look at but not as far away as the third we saw just moments later on the canyon floor. Three bison in about 15 minutes seemed like an auspicious beginning to me.

As it turns out, that feeling was right, although when I thought that I was thinking Painted Canyon represented a preview of tons and tons of animals we'd see that weekend. What the three first bison really foreshadowed was our seeing lots and lots of single and paired animals with very few groups larger than that and zero large herds. Apparently May is not the month to go see bison since the males are generally off doing their own thing by themselves rather than establishing herds or harems for mating. July or August would have been better for large herds, like about the time we hit Yellowstone in 2011. Our maximum herd size over the Memorial Day weekend? Six. Four of those six are shown in the third photograph above. That was the only group larger than three that we encountered in our time at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. And we only saw one group of three.

That scarcity of sightings made us linger at what animals we did see and look and listen closely. I didn't do this in Yellowstone much because there were so many animals to see. That and we covered the Park, which is the size of Rhode Island, in a single day. Hey, we were trying to make it all the way across the continent. There's only so much time to take in the scenery when you are doing that.

Scratching that winter coat off. Painted Canyon, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit.

These are some big animals and when they are up close next to you, hopefully with you in a car, they seem even more massive. If one of these decided it was threatened by you or me and decided it wanted to chase us off with a full speed charge, we would be in trouble. The Park guidance is to keep a distance of 25 yards between you and a bison and if it moves towards you, move a corresponding distance away to maintain the safe distance. As ungainly as these creatures seem, rest assured they can run way faster than you can. Just like most other animals on this planet I suppose.

Off roading in National Parks, is of course, strictly prohibited, but if you are driving the loop in the South Unit or the there and back road in the North Unit and happen to come across a bison on the side of the road or crossing the road, well I assume the 25 yard rule no longer applies. And there are times that you can get extremely close. May seemed like a good time of year to do this. It's not mating season, meaning hormones aren't raging, and it's not birthing season, meaning there's no maternal or paternal protective urge to want to back your SUV off the road with a little bison charge. We got incredibly close looks at one or two bison just feet from our car just by staying on the road and moving slowly past.

May is also obviously a transitional month between seasons, where the bison start to shed their winter coat in favor of a less shaggy, smooth shaven look. It was over 90 degrees the day we arrived in North Dakota and more than one bison that day seemed pretty anxious to cool down by losing part of their winter coat. We saw a couple of bison that day still half-coated who were panting pretty heavily in the mid-afternoon sun. Later on we'd see a lone bison rubbing his coat off on a fence post. That wouldn't be the last evidence of this behavior. Near pretty much every vertical post still standing along our petrified forest hike, we saw bison fur on the ground near the post, frequently with a good sized pile of bison poop nearby.

Close up. Painted Canyon, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit.

If there's one thing that surprised me about the bison we saw in North Dakota, it was how nimble and sure-footed they seemed. In Yellowstone seven years ago, I don't think I saw a single bison on any sort of hill. I assumed they just would rather stay on the grassy plains. But in Roosevelt National Park we saw some animals on what I would assume is some fairly unstable land. I realize animals are generally gifted with better walking skills than us humans but we are talking about 2,000 pound animals standing on slopes of mud and rock. We stopped at one spot in the North Unit where we saw a section of hill partially collapse under the weight of what looked to be a below 200 pound man. Either the bison are smarter than us or they are more sure footed than they look. Probably both.

Let's get back to that whole buffalo thing. More often than not, Americans refer to the bison we have here at home as buffalo. Indeed, even the signs inside the Park we were in refer to them that way. As I already stated, the sign is wrong. They are not buffalo. Apparently early European explorers thought the bison they saw while exploring North America looked like the buffalo they had seen in Asia and Africa. If this story is true, those explorers must have just heard tales or seen very poor pictures of buffalo. Other than the large, four-legged cow-like thing they both have going on, the two animals bear little resemblance to one another.

Don't believe me? Check out the pictures below showing a North American bison and an African buffalo. The bison has a thick wooly coat covering its head and front quarters which insulates the animal from the extreme cold that can occur in the environment it lives in; the buffalo does not. Bison also have thick humps on their back; not so for the buffalo. But the biggest indicator are the horns. The horns of a bison are tiny relative to its head and body size and they point straight up after growing out sideways from the head. The horns of a buffalo are formed perpendicular to its body on the tops of their heads and curve back on themselves. They are nothing like bison horns. Is that cleared up? Good.

Buffalo, Masai Mara National Park, Kenya. Bison, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit.

If you want to see buffalo, head to Africa or Asia. I can attest if you visit Botswana or Kenya or Tanzania you can see plenty. But give them more space than the bison please. They are the second most dangerous animal in Africa (after the hippo). If you want to see bison, head west, young man, after doing a little bit of research as to where you can find these magnificent creatures. 

If Theodore Roosevelt National Park ends up being on your wish list, a day and a half or so should about do you, assuming you want to drive most places and maybe take a little hike or two. We managed to take in the Painted Canyon and South Unit Scenic Loop Drive the day we got there and then handle the petrified forest hike, the entire North Unit Scenic Drive and a repeat of the South Unit Scenic Loop Drive on day two. You can easily fit in all that driving with some additional stops for some hiking.

One of the great things about National Parks is that a visit can be completely different based on each person's experiences. If you wanted to hike every trail in Theodore Roosevelt National Park from start to finish, you'd be there for a week or more. But I can highly recommend the Wind Canyon Trail in the South Unit for its incredible view of the Little Missouri River (who knows you might also see a bison along the water's edge) and the views of the Badlands in the North Unit in general. I thought the view from Oxbow Overlook at the end of the drive was the most spectacular; head away from the trail to Sperati Point for some amazing scenery.

For me, these animals are national treasures and the ultimate symbol of the American west. I know they are herd animals that most of the time do nothing very interesting but it is worth every seven years or so going to see some in the wild in person, I think. Let's see if I can wait until 2025. North Dakota was worth a long weekend to see these creatures.