July 27, 2014
Cottonwood Campground
Theodore Roosevelt National Park
Medora, North Dakota
You heard it here. The refrigerator was at 37 degrees this morning and at 33 when we came back from the great hike that is the bulk of this post.
So that is very good news and it looks like Ben at Red Trail Campground has fixed our problem for us for the grand sum of $65.00. You betcha we feel lucky. We’ve been told that a ten year old refrigerator is near the end of its life but we’re hoping we can coax a few more years out of it.
Fingers crossed that this good news continues since we are going to go even further into the wilds of North Dakota and take Winnona up to Juniper Campground in the North Unit about 80 miles from here. Watford is the nearest city and it’s 20 miles away. Medora, while it doesn’t have any services other than tourist shopping, gas and a convenience store was only 5 miles away from the campground.
When we find out this morning that the refrigerator seems to be fine, we set out for for the Petrified Forest hike on the far west side of the park. It is about a 5 mile drive down dirt roads. Best to check road conditions with the visitor center if you don’t have a high clearance vehicle.
We are ogling the scenery when about half way there David spies something white out in the grass off to the side.
We were just talking about the wildlife we had seen and listing the ones we haven’t seen or would like to see closer. Coyote, elk, pronghorn. It’s like our wish was his command. Well not really but it was a seriously terrific start to a fabulous day.
What a face!!
We watch him for a while and he seems to be watching us although we are a long way from him so far away in the grasses. But apparently our having stopped has made him alert. We’ve found this several times, that if we just keep moving wildlife sort of ignore us. But if we stop they think better of it.
At the parking lot they have this map of the trail. It begins at You Are Here and goes a half mile in until you need to decide which direction you wish to hike.
Although there is petrified wood all along this trail, I know, from Friday, that the largest number of specimens in one place are to the left.
If you are hiking the entire trail and know this you have to decide if you want the oh wows at the beginning or end of your hike.
We will go left on the little dotted line and almost to the bigger darker line which is the Maah Daah Hey Trail (ma da hey) Mandan for “an area that has been or will be around for a long time”. The entire Maah Daah Hey trail is 110 miles long. Only part of it traverses the park. You would follow it about half way down to the first little dotted line going right to hike the entire Petrified Forest Trail.
The Theodore Roosevelt National Park is the 3rd most important collection of petrified wood in the country. I assume Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona is the first but I don’t know the second. Do you?? No roads lead to this area, keeping it remote and well preserved. If you want to see it, you must hike in.
From the parking lot it is about a mile up and down some tricky rock climbs then across beautiful prairie before you arrive at the start of the major petrified trees area. We take hiking poles and they helped although you don’t need them at all after you get there unless you are going further around the loop. The entire Petrified Forest trail is 10.3 miles.
I am quite disappointed in our early pictures. The sky was not this dark. But the skies lightened up unfortunately after we left the petrified area. The weather was perfect, low 70’s with a wonderful breeze.
The trail is marked by posts every 1/4 mile or so. On one of them was what looks like a wren to me but I’ve checked all wrens and sparrows in the park listing and I’m not sure. Anyone recognize this sweetheart?
Beautiful Prairie
Getting close
Geologists say the park was once on the eastern edge of a flat swampy area covered with rivers that fanned out into a broad, sea level delta. This swampy region contained dense forests of sequoia, bald cypress, magnolia and other water loving trees growing in or near the shallow waters.
Some forests were buried by flood deposits or volcanic ash falls. When silica-rich water soaked into the trees, organic compounds in the wood were dissolved and replaced by very small crystals of quartz. This is petrification.
When we get to the petrified area they are all over the place. Some are stumps standing up, some on their sides. Some look like wood that has been split for a fire. The wood chips are also everywhere. You have to pick some of them up just to believe they aren’t wood.
Looks like a rotting tree with wood chips all around to me until I pick up the chips. They are rocks.
This is the bottom of the stump above that was sitting on the ground until the rock eroded away under it and it tipped over. I love the design.
In the beginning of this gully wash out you can see a tree trunk buried under the sediment. There may be lots more petrified trees and logs buried which will be revealed as erosion works its magic.
These two logs looked like the light weight poplar splits David used to do in our wood yard. We used them for kindling and early spring fires. I could have taken this picture except that when I picked up these light colored pieces I had to use two hands. I laughed out loud.
I hope you can see all the petrified wood strewn all over everywhere in every direction. David said it looks like a bone yard.
Even a petrified tree deserves a hug. I always wish trees a long and healthy life when I hug. This guy is for sure going to have a long life as a rock.
The petrified wood area seems to go on and on even though I don’t think it was more than 1/4 of a mile. There is just so much of it strewn here and there. It looks so real. Finally we seem to be leaving the biggest concentration although we continue to see some here and there as we hike on along the Petrified Forest Trail Loop.
We really probably could hike the entire thing but today we only go about 3 miles out and 3 miles back.
I look at this and think of Egypt.
We hike out onto the Prairie where you can see for miles and miles nothing but grass and wildflowers. It’s just gorgeous. I can imagine though how it might have felt walking for days and days with nothing but prairie to the horizon. Would they have seen more wildflowers than we do? What were the original wildflowers here before the exotics came in?
I want to keep walking, I want to walk it all. “Next time” I want to get organized and do an over night backpacking hike and stop about half way and spend the night and hike out in the morning. This hike is so remote I think it would be wonderful.
The feeling of “Wide Open Spaces” and “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room makes me start singing those songs. I just LOVE this!
I’m amazed that there are still wildflowers in late July. I wish I could come here once a month just to see how the flowers change. The coneflowers are among my favorites.
The western salsify is beautiful and unusual. Here is the flower. It’s small, maybe 3” across with slender pointed green structures the extend beyond the ray flowers. Its leaves are erect and grass like. It’s a European native so it qualifies as an exotic but I read that it is seldom a nuisance and from what I’ve seen that is true.
We have seen its striking dandelion-like seed heads somewhere every day we’ve been here but never in big clusters. Just scattered around. , They look like puffballs with parachutes. This is the very first time I’ve seen the flower.
Look at the geometry here. This thing is bigger than my hand and stands about 16” tall. It is very striking in the field.
We aren’t very far out into the prairie when we pass a buffalo wallow where they like to roll. Their rolling of course denudes the ground and it becomes just the big circle of the dust they want. I’m looking back at David coming out of the Petrified Rock area.
Big puffy cloud skies
The Prairie we are walking through is up on a butte between two canyons. The views of the canyon are just dazzling.
On we walk until the trail becomes a ridge between the two canyons. Now we can look out on either side and see badlands stretching to the Horizon.
Up we go and then our trail and starts going down down down into the canyon and then up up to a perpendicular ridge where it will meet the Maah Daah Hey Trail (pronounced ma da hey). In the Mandan Language it means “an area that has been or will be around a long time”. This intersection is about 1/3 of the way around the loop. We had thought we might go to that intersection but think better of it as we look down at the trail.
We’re almost to the edge when I find the only bench or log or anything to sit on since we’ve been out here on the prairie. It’s one of the trail posts that has somehow gotten broken off. I can’t see any reason for this perfectly good post to have broken unless perhaps one too many giant bison tried to scratch his back on it and finally just broke it off but it works great for me for a little sit down and snack. Being taller, David has a bit more trouble with the height of the bench.
After the break, I go a “little” way down but when I see how far it drops, I reluctantly head back. I would really like to hike it all. We just aren’t prepared for that. Can you see me , the blue dot with the tan hat in the picture below??
We’d have to go way down and around and back up that little tiny trail you can see going through the grasses on the left. It climbs up the butte. But unless we went on we’d have to turn right back around and do it again to turn back. Oh well, I guess we’ll turn around here.
Just this section is a long way back up. The trail post is that little brown line in the middle at the top.
And of course on the way back we see all kinds of things we did not see on the way out including this short horned lizard. I look down when I see something hurry away on the trail in front of me. He doesn’t go far, just sort of off to the side. But the trail is rather a rut so he’d have to really move to get up the sides and into the grass. He’s about 3” long including his tail and blends in perfectly with his environment. His skin is pretty amazing up close. Not only does he have those spiny looking things on the edge of what sort of resembles a shell, but his skin is rather spiny too.
We find the short horned lizard at the very edge of the grasses where the butte rock faces are present. But it’s walking back through the prairie that David finds this caterpillar on the stalk of one of the wild flowers
The best I can determine is that he is some sort of Hawkmoth Larva. If you know for sure, please let me know. He’s gorgeous isn’t he?
And then here we are back in the petrified forest where tree trunks sit on an angle atop huge butte rock faces.
This picture was taken on my Friday morning Ranger hike on this trail. It shoes how huge the trunks of some of these trees are.
Here’s the fun rock for the day. Does he look worried?? Look carefully you’ll see him.
Here we are at the edge of the Petrified Rock section on our way back to the car. We hike down to the larger rock formations and as we approach, we see off to our left much further away this time, another bull bison resting. Resting and dusting I should say. Glad he didn’t want to use the wallow on the trail. I just love that we are permitted to walk in their habitat being mindful that it is theirs and taking care not to intrude.
The very end of this hike turns out to have one wildlife sighting after another.
Hoping down the path in front of us beyond the buffalo is this really beautiful vesper sparrow. He isn’t shy at all and keeps hoping down the trail in front of us rather than flying away. This is why it takes us ages to hike a simple trail. We have to stop and watch lizards and bison and sparrows and who knows what else.
Well we do know what else – it isn’t quite as cute as the sparrow. Those who do not like to see pictures of the narrow fellows in the grass might want to skip on by this. But if you do you’ll really miss something.
Our final wildlife siting of the day was another one of those shocks. We are climbing up a narrow dirt path on our final ascent before the parking lot when off to my right I see something that causes me to stop dead in my tracks.
What we believe was either a very fat prairie rattle snake or a bull snake is sunning part of his body. He is right next to but off the trail. When I start moving backwards and stop to get his picture he just slithers across the trail and disappears but not before I get a couple of shots of him.
The first picture is of him beside the trail where I first saw him and the second is him slithering across the trail in front of me at a distance of several feet, this is a zoom.
Rattlesnakes are not aggressive and given the choice will retreat rather than strike. So all we had to do was make sure that like the buffalo, we didn’t surprise him or make him feel cornered. We stepped off the path in the opposite direction that he had been and walked a few feet and then rejoined the path. By then I’m sure he was long gone. But it is a thrill to see him and I was really surprised at how big he was and how lovely whoever he is.
We spent another fabulous day here in the park hiking a total of about 6 miles in and out. My only regret is that we didn’t plan for the whole 10.3. “Next time”!!
