Into North Dakota (day 26)

(Sorry for the lapse in posting - weak cell service in our ND campground, and posting when riding in the car makes me feel sick.)

So, what can $6 buy you? Well, it gets you a night (we spent two) at Buffalo Gap Campground, a very nice campground tucked into a grove of cottonwood trees as part of the Little Missouri National Grasslands. You don’t get electrical hook-ups, but there were flush toilets, pay showers, and our site had lots of shade.

Shade is important because this part of North Dakota is a giant field, punctuated with colorful badlands rock formations. Unlike all of the rain and cold through most of our trip so far, here it was 75 degrees under a powerful sun, with a constant breeze across the plain.

This campground is near Medora and Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Medora is a spooky kind of town, not because its haunted, but rather because the whole town is populated as essentially a theme park. Almost everyone wears a name tag. You can go to the Medora cowboy steak dinner, with your steak cooked in a big vat of boiling oil (probably not like the cowboys did it.) You can go to the Medora Musical, a clean-scrubbed play celebrating the history of North Dakota, hard work, livestock, and patriotism. (A cowboy would likely go drinking instead.)

Forget about anything useful like a grocery store, laundry, or a gas pump that has anything better than regular fuel (Honda suggests premium when towing.) Instead, Medora has truly useful stores - like multiple fudge outlets. Good thing we (once again) had stocked up on food at Wal-Mart before leaving Miles City on Tuesday.

A big draw of this part of the trip was to ride the Maah Dah Hey trail. This 93 mile trail runs between the north and south parts of the National Park. You can ride your mountain bike on the trail between the park sections, but not in the park itself. (Stupid, given you can ride horses on the trails in the park - and bikes don’t leave piles of poop all over.)

Leaving from our campground, we rode the Buffalo Gap trail for six miles total, out and back. The singletrack is smooth, traveling over rolling grades, with some twisty bits - it’s a lot of fun. (It would have been more fun if we were in shape.) I didn’t see any prairie rattlesnakes, but I think I might have run over the tail of a green-colored snake, and I might have squashed a horny toad. Oops.