Tatanka

What is it about even numbered years and bison lately? In 2018, we spent some time in North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park, saw a few bison and I wrote my first bison post on this blog. Two years later, we visited Yellowstone National Park, saw a ton of bison pretty much everywhere (including outside Yellowstone) and I wrote my second bison post on this blog. Now it's 2022 and we've just returned from a visit to the southwestern corner of South Dakota where there are (you know what's coming...) a whole lot of bison.

I called that first bison post in 2018 "Bison Bison" after the animals' genus and species and to emphasize that they are NOT buffalo. I added another "Bison" with my second post. I can't in all good conscience just add another "Bison" to the name of this blog post so I'm changing things up and going with "Tatanka", which is the Lakota (or Sioux, if they are an enemy to you) word for these animals. Here goes blog post number three about bison. This has to be the last one, if for no other reason than I don't know where exactly I'd go that I haven't already seen these creatures.

Although I guess there might be some in Nebraska.

Bison on the move in Badlands National Park.

I have documented the almost extinction of the bison on my two past posts on this same topic but a refresher is probably in order: when European settlers first arrived in North America and had an opportunity to see just how many bison there were out there in what is now the United States of America, they used estimates of 30 to 60 million of these animals. In 1889, the number was down to 1,091. North of 30 million to about a thousand in about 100 years or so. It was a staggering slaughter driven by greed, cruelty and a desire to cut off one of the essential natural resources available to Native American tribes. Kill the bison, kill the people who relied on them, or so went the thinking.

If we had visited South Dakota 200 years ago, we likely would have found vast herds of bison, thousands upon thousands of these animals with enough mass to make the Earth tremble when they started running. We would have also found a thriving Lakota culture whose very spiritual and literal existence would have revolved around the animals. Food, clothing, housing and tools would have all been missing without the bison.

Fifty or so years later, there would be no bison in South Dakota. Extinct in the 1870s.

Wind Cave National Park, Black Hills.

So considering their total extinction in the state in the nineteenth century, we knew our bison-watching experience in South Dakota was likely to be way different than in a place like Yellowstone National Park, which is one of the very few places on Earth where there is a herd descended from animals that roamed in the same spot hundreds of years ago. Not that we really care about lineage of bison or anything like that. We don't need purebred bison to enjoy watching these magnificent creatures. But the ones we hoped to find in South Dakota would have been deliberately placed there. They also would be roaming a far smaller parcel of land than Yellowstone National Park, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island.

For that last reason, we thought we'd stand the best chance of finding a significant number of bison by searching in a few places. Like a couple of National Parks and a State Park.

And yes, you read that last part correct, there is a State Park (Custer State Park, site of a memorable 2020 de-pantsing incident for a tourist who ignored the "don't approach bison" warning) in South Dakota with a herd of bison. This is not the first time we'd been in a such a place. There's one in Utah also (Antelope Island State Park) but Custer has a significantly larger bison presence, or at least it did when we visited. And they are not in pens or cages or anything like that. They are roaming free (although the whole place is fenced with cattle guards where roads cross the fence line). I'm completely jealous. I can't remember the last time I went to a Virginia State Park, probably because there are none nearby (or anywhere for that matter) that have their own herd of bison. I'd be there all the time if I lived in southwest South Dakota. 

Custer State Park. The horns on the first bison are particularly impressive.

So what were we up against, here? Well, Wind Cave National Park has between 250 and 400 bison; Badlands National Park has about 1,200 or so; and Custer State Park boasts 1,000 to 1,600 at any one time. All of the Parks (not just Custer State Park) are fenced to keep the animals in a relatively small location. At Custer, the herd is managed to right-size it to its location. There are no predators large enough to take down a bison in the Park so to prevent over-grazing, some members of the herd are auctioned off every year. You might think fencing and herd-managing equates to a zoo. I can see you thinking that way; we didn't. These are still free-roaming wild animals who survive out on their own. It may not have quite been Yellowstone, but this counted for us.

And as we found out, just showing up and paying admission didn't guarantee a bison sighting. We worked for the photos that I'm posting on here. We also didn't want to find ones and twos of bison like we found four years ago in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We really wanted to find a sizeable herd with some baby bison, considering our visit coincided pretty well with the mid-point of calving season. Who doesn't love baby bison?

Close-up. Wind Cave National Park.

We started our bison hunt last month in Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park. The two Parks share a common boundary so driving from one to the next was extremely convenient. Both Parks are located in the Black Hills, a coniferous forest with intermittent meadows and open landscapes which in theory would make bison-spotting much more difficult than somewhere with a more open landscape. The Hills are also sacred to the Lakota and several other Native American tribes, but that's another story for another time.

Perhaps it's obvious from the pictures posted so far here but we did succeed in seeing bison at both Wind Cave and Custer. At Wind Cave, we covered the main Park drive down Highway 87 both north to south and south to north along with traveling on the gravel / dirt road called Highland Ridge Road or Route 5. That latter road is not super easy in a Toyota Camry and considering we got a good look at about three bison on the entire road (although that did include the close-up above), we probably could have skipped it and not missed out on anything. Although we had no way of knowing that ahead of time.

Highway 87 is a gorgeous winding road that takes you from prairie to forest and back to prairie with some incredible one way bridges. But the only place we saw bison on that road was at the north end on outside of the forest. And there were not that many bison along that road either. More than the gravel / dirt road but not a spectacular number. Wind Cave had the fewest bison of the three parks so perhaps that's not surprising.

Our time in Custer State Park was remarkably similar to Wind Cave. Custer has a larger herd and a brand new (...like literally brand new as of May 2022) Bison Center in the Park but we saw no more bison on our drive along the Wildlife Loop Road than we did in Wind Cave. One of the first things I do when I get back from any trip is to organize my photos and flag my favorites. Of all the bison pictures we took in South Dakota, only one Custer photo made the cut. That's not to say our experience was worse at Custer State Park than Wind Cave, but we certainly emerged with fewer keeper pictures there than we did earlier in the day. 

Last two pictures from Wind Cave. 

I'm also not saying our day searching for bison in the Black Hills wasn't worth it. It totally was. I'd definitely put it ahead of our experience in North Dakota four years ago, but we also definitely didn't get what we hoped to find. And yes, I've been on enough wildlife trips to know not to have high expectations. Our hopes for the herd and the baby bison were now pinned squarely on Badlands National Park.

2022 was not my first time at Badlands National Park. I stopped there for maybe 30 or 45 minutes on my way from Kansas City to Deadwood in 2011. We drove maybe a third of the Badlands Loop Road (the main road connecting the two primary entrances to the Park) on that visit and saw the amazing landscape characteristic of the Dakota badlands, but certainly nothing resembling any sort of sizeable wildlife. Or any wildlife at all, really. I would not have placed high hopes of Badlands salvaging my bison experience 11 years later based on that trip in 2011. This seemed risky.

It wasn't. Badlands National Park was the best thing we did in our four days in South Dakota. Hands down. We had some amazing experiences on other days. In fact, pretty much everything we did in the four days we were out doing things in South Dakota was really memorable, which is a little shocking to write. But Badlands was the best.

Two bison pictures from Badlands National Park.

We planned Badlands. We charted out a route that had us entering in the middle of the Park fairly early in the day; hoping for some bighorn sheep at Pinnacles Overlook; heading east down Badlands Loop Road; circling back through Wall (and Wall Drug!); re-entering in the middle of the Park; and finally heading west along the gravel Sage Creek Rim Road where, according to the Park's website, we were most likely to see bison.

In what turned out to be a really good omen, we found three bachelor bison before we even entered the Park. We got lucky with the bighorns shortly after that. 14 total, including one lamb, set against the gorgeous eroded landscape of the badlands that looks like some giant had taken a giant plow to the Earth and then just left the ground that way and walked away, leaving it cut and scarred as a series of valleys between sand and orange-ish colored mounds. The Badlands Loop Road winds on top of, between and around these mounds, and we hoped for a sighting of a bison or the whole herd every time we saw around the next one. We got none.

I don't know quite what it was about Badlands. Certainly the bison and the bighorn sheep sightings helped but I think more than anything else it was the landscape and the weather. The place is so different between the badlands (small b) areas and the prairies. There's such a contrast between those two but it IS just those two. It's not like Yellowstone with their five or six or seven or eight or more different environments. Just badlands and prairie. I think it helped that it was sunny and windy to keep us warm and cool. I've been in windier places for sure in my life but I don't think I've ever seen birds fly into the wind and go exactly nowhere or seen fields of grass rippled to make them like impressionist painting backgrounds the way we saw at Badlands. All of that contributed to my love of that Park the second time around. 

And yes, we DID see the herd of bison we hoped to find. We found them on Sage Creek Rim Road, just like the website suggested we would. We actually saw multiple groups of bison along that road, in bachelor groups of twos and threes and a larger herd of what also looked like an all-male herd of 20 or 25 or so. We saw more bachelor bison in Badlands than in Wind Cave and Custer combined.

The herd was the best. 50, 60, maybe 70 bison. Too many to count quickly, or even at all if we had tried because they tend not to stand still. I get that this herd we came across is tiny compared to the sizes of the groups that used to roam the prairies and the hills and the forests and badlands of what is now South Dakota. Those days are gone. For now, the herds in Badlands and places like that are the best we have. Maybe one day they'll get bigger but they'll never get back to the numbers they used to have. There's not enough contiguous open space. Humans won't allow it.

Bison as far as the eye can see. And a baby up close. Badlands National Park.

There were plenty of future bison adults in the herd too. Juvenile males who will one day compete with their brothers and cousins for the right to the herd for themselves along with newly born calfs who couldn't have been more than a few months old, pale brown and not yet the darker color of their mothers or the brood born the prior year. It's encouraging seeing species survive and it's great that all three parks we visited have this circle of life continuing, even if it will never be what it was.

I don't think I'll be writing about bison again on this blog. These creatures have been such a source of joy as they have taken us to new states as we've come closer and closer to all fifty. I'd love to re-visit Yellowstone again someday. That place was definitely the number one bison Park I've ever been to and there's so many other things to see there. But Wind Cave and Custer measured up admirably based on their herd sizes and Badlands will go down as a signature National Park experience. I'm glad I went back. It was sort of a throw-in, too obvious to pass up. It definitely turned out to be so much more than that.

Pretty satisfied with Badlands National Park.

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How We Did It

Wind Cave National Park and Badlands National Park are open year round to visitors. Each Park has a single Visitor Center. Visitor Center hours vary by season at Wind Cave. Badlands' Visitor Center is open year round, except for certain holidays, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Clicking the name of each Park in this paragraph will take you to the Parks' Operating Hours & Seasons webpage. The gift store at Badlands, by the way, is incredible. We could have spent a fortune in that place.

One of the big draws to Wind Cave is the variety of cave tours offered daily into the Park's namesake underground cavern. We elected not to explore the cave. We've been in caves before and our schedule was full enough roaming around on the surface of the Earth that day Maybe one day we'll go back underground, but it wasn't to be in South Dakota.

Custer State Park is also open year round to visitors. Services which operate in the summer may not operate all year. There is a $20 admission for a seven day pass and season passes are available. The Park's brand new Bison Center is open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Memorial Day to Labor Day with reduced hours during other seasons. There's some good information in the Bison Center but a visit isn't going to take that long.

If you are traveling between Custer State Park and Rapid City, I'd highly recommend a drive along the Needles Highway, otherwise known as South Dakota Route 87. We drove back to Rapid City along this road and the views are truly stunning, particularly through the last tunnel hewn out of a giant boulder.

The cover picture of this post is a detail of a sculpture on the southwest corner of 6th and Main Streets in downtown Rapid City, South Dakota. There are other animals hidden in the sculpture of the native American on that street corner. The bison embedded in the figure's headdress seemed to be an appropriate cover photo to me.

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Bison Bison Bison

About two and a half years ago, we visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. We wanted to visit a new state and see bison. We were successful in both efforts, although I think we never saw more than five bison together on that long weekend trip and we probably saw fewer than 50 bison total the entire time we were there. 

I called the post that I wrote about that trip Bison Bison, the animals' genus and species name, to emphasize that these creatures are not buffalo. Today's post adds another "bison" to the title because we just finished a trip where we saw way, way, way more bison than we did in 2018 in North Dakota. 

When I wrote my last bison blog post, I offered up some pretty chilling numbers: an estimated 20 to 30 million bison on the great plains before the arrival of European man reduced to 1,091 by the year 1889. Those statistics only considered bison on the great plains because that's where the slightly more than a thousand ended up. The real numbers are way worse. There are estimates out there of 30 to 60 million total bison alive before the 1800s, so it's really 60 million to 1,000 in less than a couple of centuries. It's an almost inconceivable destruction of a single species.

How did this happen? Hunting, habitat destruction, disease, the railroad, sport killing, a belief that slaying the bison would hasten the death of the Native American tribes. Take your pick. They are all significant factors. What is it about man that we feel compelled to wipe out every member of a species? Bison ranged as far east as Ohio at one point. Ohio!!!! I always think of bison as a western animal. Who'd have thought they lived that far east? Not me, certainly, but maybe that's because that's because they were wiped out in Ohio in 1802.

Bison sculpture showing Native American warrior on horseback chasing six bison. Antelope Island State Park, Utah.

There were some legitimate and half-hearted efforts made in the 1800s to preserve the herds of bison roaming the American west and midwest. Several states introduced legislation that made it illegal to waste bison meat (bison were regularly killed for hides and their bodies left to rot where they were killed) but the laws were either not enforced or vetoed by the state's governor before they became law (I'm looking at you, Kansas!). Idaho was a trailblazer of sorts in species conservation, becoming the first state to enact a law protecting the bison in 1864. Although they passed the law after all the bison in Idaho were eradicated (d'oh!!). New Mexico did the exact same stupid thing in 1880.

The United States house and senate eventually took a shot at preservation, passing a bill protecting female bison in 1874, only to see it go deliberately unsigned by President Ulysses S. Grant. Further north, Canada did us one better, actually passing sweeping protections for bison all the way into law. And then they repealed it the very next year. Overall, we as humans just weren't very serious about keeping these animals on the face of the Earth.

Thank God we didn't finish the job. Those 1,091 from 1889 have rebounded to about half a million today, although many of those 500,000 or so animals are cross-breeds somehow with cattle. There's a herd of about 500 or so in Theodore Roosevelt National Park and we saw very few of those in 2018. This year, we went big with a trip to Yellowstone National Park which has the largest wild herd in the world at 5,000 or so. Four full days in the Park would likely get us the bison viewing experience of a lifetime.

Bison herd. Lamar Valley. Yellowstone National Park. This is my favorite bison pic of the trip.

So first of all, Yellowstone is not Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It's way bigger, the landscape is significantly more varied and there are a whole ton of bison (not buffalo) everywhere. If we had wanted to spend a single day inside Yellowstone and see no bison, I'm not sure it would have been possible. We saw solitary bison around Upper Geyser Basin on day one in Yellowstone. We saw pairs and threes of bachelor bison in Hayden Valley. We saw bison freezing in the early morning throughout the western side of the Park. And we saw massive herds between Norris and Madison and in Lamar Valley.

By "massive herds" here, I don't mean in the millions or thousands or even hundreds of animals. I mean maybe 100. In 2020, that passes for massive, bison-herd-wise. We tried counting one especially large group and got to 86 before we lost count of which we had counted and which we had not. Still, 86 or maybe up to 100 is way more than the five maximum we saw at Theodore Roosevelt two years ago. 

We saw them spread across fields, running down hillsides, eating at a distance of feet from the roadside and running in a herd in the opposite lane of the road between Tower-Roosevelt and Lamar Valley as if they were moving commuters on the way to work. They were everywhere and there was a ton of time over four plus days in the Park to get some great looks at these creatures. 

Large herd of bison between Madison and Norris. Yellowstone National Park.

Closer look in Lamar Valley, Yellowstone National Park. 

One of the great things about spending so much concentrated time watching bison (or any other large animal for that matter) is that you get to appreciate both how massive these things are but also take in their smallest behaviors. An adult male bison can weigh up to 2,000 pounds and they are solid. And dangerous. I guess you could be fooled into thinking they are just shaggier cows with a bit more weight but they move way quicker and faster than any cow I've seen. You get a sense of that size when they walk or run within a couple of feet of your open car window (not kidding about the distance there). These are some large and lethal animals.

It seems like every year there's a story about someone getting gored or worse by a bison somewhere in the United States, including in Yellowstone. The most notable bison "attack" this year probably occurred in South Dakota's Custer State Park where a woman was picked up by her belt loop and tossed by a bison after getting a bit too close to a calf. What is with these people? Even if you didn't get handed a flyer describing how dangerous bison are when you enter Yellowstone (you do, by the way), what makes you want to get close to an animal with sharp horns ten times the size of a good-sized adult man?

While we didn't see anyone get attacked in our week at Yellowstone, we did see several instances of people getting uncomfortably close to bison in the Park. If something had broken the wrong way for the woman who was about five times further from her car than to the approaching bison one morning near Norris, I could have seen something seriously troubling happening. I understand the excitement of wanting to get close to these animals, but just keep your car (or at least another person) between you and them. It's just smart. 

Bison swimming, Hayden Valley, Yellowstone National Park.

Bison keeping warm near a hot spring in the below freezing early morning. Yellowstone National Park.

While you are keeping a respectful distance, watch. You might find something worth remembering.

It's always thrilling to see wildlife super close up. One of the most exciting aspects of seeing bison in particular in Yellowstone is that while we are not supposed to be approaching these animals to closer than 25 yards, there's nothing preventing you from being approached by a bison or two or twelve or more. And if there's a species that will get close to you in Yellowstone, it's the bison, the biggest species in the Park.

I feel pretty comfortable in saying that it's unlikely that a bison is going to attack your car. I'm not saying it's never happened, just that I felt pretty secure inside with the doors closed and the windows up (and mostly when they were down too for that matter) when we were in Yellowstone. But there were times I worried just a little bit which I guess made those bison encounters all the more thrilling. These animals are aggressive with one another and I don't know enough about bison to know if they are play fighting or really getting serious. There was one time that two bison in a pretty confined spot tussled with each other and then raced past our car. No danger really but there was a sense for a second that something could have gone wrong, if a bison had decided to run headlong into a large metal object. Although why would they, really?

The two aggressive bison rushing past the passenger side of the car were part of a bachelor foursome. We thought we might be subject to a second round when we saw one of the two left behind digging in the dirt with his front hoof, looking very much like a bull ready to charge. As it turned out, he was just loosening up the dirt so he could roll around and cool off in the dust. 

Nothing like a good dust bath! Between Norris and Madison. Yellowstone National Park.

Bison in the road in Yellowstone. Not an uncommon sight.

We'd seen bison in the distance earlier in the week roll around in the dirt in a couple of other locations in the Park. Never really understood that if the dirt wasn't loose already, the bison were willing to break it up a little so they could get good and dusty. 

We got plenty of insight into bison life in four plus days over and above their dust bathing habits and plenty of time watching them eat. When in herds they are clearly protective of calves. We always felt a little skittish even in the car when around young bison, especially when the one 20 feet or so away looked right at us and mooed towards us through the open car window. And there was lots of aggression between males (we assume) manifested in pushing and shoving (mostly with their heads) and chasing each other away.

They also clearly appreciate Yellowstone's thermal spring areas. We saw several groups of bison near some of the steam vents and hot springs in the Park, particularly early in the morning (the temperature swing in Yellowstone in early October is pretty much low to mid-20s to mid-70s each day). It was actually pretty amazing to watch the steam freeze as ice on the bison's backs. I read one sign in the Park that said only the fattiest and furriest bison would survive the Rocky Mountain winters. They think they need those steam vents in early October? Just wait until February or March. 

More bison in the mist.

Sitting in a car (or sometimes even venturing outside of the vehicle) watching bison in Yellowstone in the middle of a global pandemic was incredible. It almost made it seem like things were sort of OK and almost normal. I mean, I'd be watching bison the exact same way if there weren't a deadly virus on the loose. And there's a lot to see and observe. Leaving behind West Yellowstone, Montana each morning and heading into the Park in search of wildlife was an escape. And bison, the most visible and obvious animal in the Park (despite numbering fewer than the elk), were the symbol of that escape, just like they represent both the National Park Service (they are the Service's mascot after all) and the United States in general.

Although I have to say the one added wardrobe accessory that this pandemic has mandated in the form of a face mask or neck gaiter does come in useful when you are standing outside before dawn with the temperature in the 20s.

We didn't just see bison in Yellowstone on this trip. We drove up to northwest Wyoming from Salt Lake City through Grand Teton National Park. We saw our first significant-sized herd of bison in the Tetons but none of those pictures made the cut. 

We also hit up Antelope Island State Park just north of SLC right after we landed. This was the second time this year we found ourselves in a Utah State Park (who'd have thought it?). Antelope Island is a piece of land in the south end of the Great Salt Lake with its very own bison herd. While the quality and quantity of bison sightings were nowhere near what they were in Yellowstone, the backdrop of the shoreline of the Salt Lake made for some different types of bison sightings. If you are in Salt Lake City, I'd recommend a visit.

Bison with the Great Salt Lake. Antelope Island State Park, Utah.

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How We Did It

There are bison all over Yellowstone National Park. They are not difficult to spot. Just cruise around the Park and look. And watch the road while you are scanning the horizon for wildlife. One of the easiest places to spot bison is right in the middle of the road you are driving on. Yellowstone is open year round, but there are portions of the Park that close each winter. Check their website for more details.

There are many species in Yellowstone that you will need to get up early or visit right before nightfall to see. Bison are not one of those species. I guess being the biggest animal around affords a measure of safety. Or at least the illusion of it.

The entrance to Antelope Island State Park is about a 45 minute drive from Salt Lake City airport. From there, things slow down a bit. It took us about an hour and a half to drive down to the southern end of the island (with stops) and back. The drive across the Great Salt Lake is pretty impressive. It was hazy the day we made the trip. I bet it's way better when it's clear. The Park is open daily from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. There are allegedly pronghorn, mule deer and bighorn sheep in the Park. We didn't see any but we were focused on bison and had a long drive ahead of us to Jackson so didn't linger too long.

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Yellowstone

It's been almost three years since I've pre-blogged about a destination. I figure it's about time for one of those posts in advance of next month's travel plans.

In 2011, I spent two weeks with my friends Mike and Bryan driving across the United States from my home in Arlington, Virginia all the way to Portland, Oregon. It was the first time I'd ever driven across the entire continent and it's a kind of trip that I won't likely ever make again. 

I actually probably shouldn't make statements like that. If there's one thing that 2020 has taught me, it's that things I never expected to happen will happen whether I like it or not. So yeah...never say never or even won't likely ever.

One of the highlights of that long distance drive was a two night stop at Yellowstone National Park. We arrived there in the afternoon from the east after traveling 12 plus hours from Deadwood, South Dakota, and left maybe about 40 hours later to the west en route to Seattle. With so far to go in just two weeks, there just wasn't much time to linger, but we did think it was important to get in a whole day in the Park. That meant two nights.

In our one full day there, we set out first thing in the morning from our hotel in Lake Village and headed north and counter-clockwise around the Great Loop, hitting the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Tower-Roosevelt area and Mammoth Hot Springs, before heading south to Old Faithful and then back around to the hotel. If there's one thing to be said about our time in Yellowstone, it's that we didn't run out of sights to see. 

The main reason we didn't run out of stuff to do in a single day is Yellowstone National Park is massive. At almost 3,500 square miles, it's bigger than the entire state of Delaware by about 40% and it's more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Maybe you don't think of Rhode Island and Delaware as being big but we're comparing the size of an entire state to the size of a single National Park. This place is big. Too big, in fact, to cover in a single day. One day I figured I'd have to go back and do it right.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

2020 has been littered with cancelled trips. Costa Rica in March. New Mexico in May. California in June. Maine in July and (again) in August. England later in August. And most recently we made the decision to give up on a trip to Rwanda, Uganda and Zanzibar in October. That last one hurt, but there was really no other option.

It hasn't all been doom and gloom this year. We have both been healthy all year long and we've been able to transform some of those cancelled trips into reasonable facsimiles of the original intent. A national parks trip to California got morphed into a national parks trip in Utah and Colorado. Maine got replaced with Vermont, although Maine was really a substitute for Costa Rica so Vermont didn't stand a chance of coming close to the original deal there. New Mexico and England? Well...some other time maybe.

But when it came time to think about if we should even try to replace a trip where we'd be trekking into the mountains to see gorillas in the wild, driving around Queen Elizabeth National Park on safari and walking through the jungles of Zanzibar looking for monkeys, we were a little lost. We thought about a trip up to Churchill, Manitoba to see polar bears but the fact that Canada is not admitting Americans to their country right now killed that one pretty quickly. Ultimately, we decided if we were going to replace an animal watching trip with something similar that had to be in the United States, we should head out to a place where we could see the greatest collection of wild wildlife in our country. And that meant just one place: Yellowstone. Looks like that return trip I thought about in 2011 is happening this year.

This time we are doing it right. No 40 hours in the Park this year. We are dedicating three whole days plus whatever time we can squeeze in from a fourth day driving up through Grand Teton National Park starting early in the morning. We'll be hitting parts of the Park like the North and South Entrances, but most especially the Lamar Valley, that I didn't get a chance to visit in 2011. I have to say I'm pretty excited about that last part.

When I visited Yellowstone in 2011, my greatest hope was that I'd see a bison. Just one would have been enough. At that time I knew precious little about the Park, including that seeing a bison was pretty much a sure thing. We saw one strolling down the middle of the road in front of our car within the first half hour we were in the park. After that, we saw them everywhere. Our car was even surrounded by them on the way out of the west entrance. I need not have worried about seeing a bison. 

I was incredibly casual about looking for animals back then. I didn't make a deliberate effort to find the spots with the greatest concentration of wildlife or go out looking at dawn or dusk when I now know the chances of spotting creatures is the greatest. We just roamed at a time that was convenient for us. And honestly, while we saw a grizzly bear and tons of bison, we really didn't see much else. There are supposedly more elk in the park than any other mammal species and we saw one. And at a great distance at that. I'd forgotten we spotted a coyote until I looked through my pictures from that trip while writing this post. The 2011 trip to Yellowstone was all about that one grizzly and the many, many bison.

This year will be way different. I'm certain. Or at least I'm hoping since I'm way, way more prepared. There's no way we aren't seeing much, much more wildlife this time around. 

2011 in Yellowstone: grizzly bear, elk and coyote. And a whole lot of landscape.

Wildlife wasn't the only reason I put Yellowstone on our 2011 westward journey. I also went for the scenery and for the volcanic action, including a stop to watch Old Faithful geyser erupt surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of other people. Here again, we just scratched the surface nine years ago. I was impressed by the colors and landscape at our stop at Mammoth Hot Springs and the Rockies are amazing. But in the last month I found out we missed as many impressive spots as we saw, if not more, including Grand Prismatic Spring. No way are we missing that this year, not even if its guarded by a few grizzlies and a pack or two of wolves. 

I might chalk the animals and the geysers and hot pools we missed up to a mistake or two. But honestly, we didn't have any time to spare in our one day anyway. Three whole days seems much more sensible. 

2011 is a long time ago. I've changed so much in the way I travel since nine years ago, from the knowledge I carry with me, to my travel habits, to the technology that I've embraced. I've gathered together the most spectacular photographs from nine plus years ago that I could for this post and I'm not thrilled. My photos of animals likely stretched the capabilities of my Blackberry to the max and my landscapes aren't much better. I even managed to cut the top of Old Faithful off with my beginner camera skills. 

There were also fewer than about 30 total pictures to choose from. If there's one definite improvement I've made in my picture-taking habits, it's to take pictures in bunches. If I come back from this trip with fewer than 500 pics of Yellowstone I'll be surprised.

I'm lucky to be able to have a second shot at Yellowstone, even as I continue to whine about being (mostly) confined to the United States. I get that our country's government has badly bungled the response to this global pandemic and by the time it's all over or close to it, I'll have abandoned international travel for 12 months or probably more. Yellowstone won't be Rwanda, Uganda and Zanzibar but it will likely still be an incredible natural showcase. I'm excited to see it again and for a lot longer and in a different season. And not just for the wildlife. I know we missed some incredible sights or made short stops at others in 2011 which are now on my list for this year.

Yellowstone in an American icon. And I think it's going to be spectacular the second time around.

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 I was probably optimistic. 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.