I’ve long felt like a guilty Minnesotan for having never been to North Dakota. It was on my travel list for 2020, pre-Covid. Luckily, not much else was; we were planning to go light on travel this year to save up for a bathroom renovation. Whenever I finally got there, I didn’t want to just tag Fargo on the shoulder and call it a day. I wanted to span the entire state. Several friends has strongly recommended Theodore Roosevelt National Park on the far western side of North Dakota, so I had it on my list for when an opportunity arose.
In the early phases of the pandemic, I signed a contract for a new job at Carleton College and pushed out my start date as far as I could to have more time to wrap up things at my current job. I also took my own advice and left myself two weeks off to rest up and decompress. I thought about taking a road trip through Canada to Vermont, or a car camping adventure around Lake Superior. However, any travel still felt unwise in mid-May 2020.
Sunset from our campsite
However, as I was wrapping up my last week at Propel Nonprofits (previous employer), Governor Walz okayed “dispersed camping.” I gave Theodore Roosevelt National Park a call, and a very friendly ranger told me that while all campgrounds were closed, backcountry camping was still okay. Essentially, as long as you were willing to hike into the park and set up your tent 0.25 miles off the trail and out of sight, you had a free pass to the North Dakota badlands. Having done some pack-in camping, we were up for the adventure.
Even though we would still pass by gas stations, backcountry camping in North Dakota felt like the safest travel option to preserve some physical distance from others. And so, we packed our bags. We would have to pack in all of our own water, since the water in the park was too silty to filter and tasted strongly of minerals, and we also brought our own food.
We ended up parking at the Halliday Well Trailhead in the park’s South Unit (the North Unit is about 1.5-2 hours away) and hiking in along the Lower Paddock Creek trail. Immediately out of the parking lot we encountered our first prairie dog town. They were darting around and squeaking loudly at each other, and us.
It turned out to be harder to find a suitable campsite than we thought. At first the number of places we could just “set up camp” was thrilling. It quickly became overwhelming. We had to factor in wind direction, how easily we could navigate back to the site, distance from prairie dogs and the bison and wild horse trails, slope, and most difficult, whether we were hidden from sight in the expansive open valley.
View from our “dining room.”
J making sure we weren’t visible from the trail.
We finally found a spot on a cliff overlooking Paddock Creek. That first night, as we were exploring the trail near us, we turned a corner and saw our first wild horse. About 140 of them roam freely throughout TRNP, and all of them have been named by the rangers. The next day, we would come upon a few dozen of them, including several foals, blocking our trail. They will cause no harm, but we could distress them if we got too close, so we kept our distance.
A bunch of wild horses blocking our trail. Or rather, we interrupted their water break.
Even though we kept our distance, the horses still felt so close.
We also came upon several bison, a couple of antelope, snakes, and rabbits. We found no less than 7 ticks on each other and in our tent. Hint: Avoid spring camping if ticks aren’t your thing.
On our one full day in the park, we hiked 13 miles, largely through the West Loop (Lower Paddock Creek > Lower Talkington > Jones Creek). We crisscrossed the creek, always able to find a spot to hop over, with one exception where I mistook a very deep, soft mud pie for solid ground. We encountered 4 other people in 5 hours of hiking.
It was stunning. From the prairie-dogged lined creek to the grassy buttes preferred by the horses and bison, we encountered a surprising range of topography. At the far end of the loop, the ground was dry and the striated, mineral-filled mounds ruled the day. On the return trek, the wind picked up as we entered more lush, rolling hills overlooking the badlands.
We ended up only staying 2 nights instead of three because the winds picked up to 25-30 mph, making sleep nearly impossible. That meant we didn’t get to the North Unit as planned. It also means that another North Dakota trip is in the future.
Overlooking the Little Missouri River