by Nick Taylor and Barbara Nevins Taylor

Driving west on Tuesday, we listened to the news. Reports from Yellowstone were grim. The park’s flood-damaged roads wouldn’t be open for some time. But the high plains eased our disappointment. As we crossed them, we saw skies that seemed wider than we knew as Easterners, and sprawling landscapes that put horizons almost out of reach.

Near Medora, the landscapes closed again to upthrust rocky hills that in another age closed off easy passage. The Lakota Indians called this territory mako sica, meaning bad land or bad earth.

French fur trappers used a phrase meaning they were bad lands to cross. Even in the bright travel day we had that Tuesday, the clustered hills looked forbidding and impassable.

We chose Medora because it was an entry point for the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the Badlands. Driving into town, we saw that the whole place was a de facto monument to the boisterous twenty-sixth president.

On the main street we found ourselves behind a line of horse riders in western gear.

Teddy Roosevelt had come to the western Dakotas to hunt buffalo in the early 1880s, when he was in his twenties. He fell in love with the rough, yet beautiful, terrain and then bought cattle ranches, one near Medora. In the Badlands and high prairie he gained an appreciation of America’s grand landscapes and came to believe they should be shared with all Americans.  

Medora is the gateway to the Badlands but it is like a western toy town supported by the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation. Harold Shafer, a businessman, fell in love with the Badlands and the Teddy Roosevelt history and wanted to preserve and promote it. He began by renovating the Rough Riders Hotel in 1962. Three years later, he’d built an outdoor theater to stage “Teddy Roosevelt Rides Again: A Medora Musical.” It has played every summer since, and brings in the tourists.

Somewhere else the Rough Riders might be the name of an S&M establishment, but not Medora. We entered to find the hotel and its spiffy lobby had been recently updated.

The young woman who checked us in might have stepped out of a Gaugin painting. Barbara asked where she was from and told us she was from Tonga via Hawaii, where she was studying hotel management. Her school had an arrangement for interns with the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation. While we talked, a manager came out of the office and it turned out that he was from Ukraine. He’d married a mid-westerner, they had children and, he said, “Now I’m from here.”

So right off the bat, this was interesting. Then, as if we needed reminding about where we were, a portrait of Teddy greeted us as we headed to the elevators.

We hurriedly stashed our things and went back out for a scenic drive in the park. On the way we passed the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame and a lot of western clothing stores. At the park entrance, we paid $20 for an annual national parks senior pass that was a bargain even if we only used it once. Right away, the drive through Theodore Roosevelt National Park amazed us with its beauty.

It was easy to see TR’s inspiration for setting aside 230 million acres of land for the American public during his presidency. The spectacular Badlands landscape thrust up out of the earth twisting into weird shapes and layers and layers of buttes and spirals. Deposits of rock here began 75 million years ago and the erosion that created the unusual formations began 500,000 years ago.  Now the park has 244,000 acres of rocky hills and grassy prairie. 

Normally the scenic drive is 36 miles long, but erosion had closed the road beyond mile 24. So we turned around and had a 48-mile drive, and the scenery was just as spectacular the second time. We stopped whenever we could to take closer looks at the rock formations in front of us and  scan the vista that stretched on and on. Our New York license plates caught the attention of fellow easterners. At one spot, a man from Vermont introduced himself. He said, “My wife likes to garden in the summer and I like to travel.” He was alone in his camper van and eager to have a conversation. We met a couple from Rhode Island next. They explained that they’d been touring the west for a couple of months and like us they were astounded by the beauty of the Badlands. At just a week into our road trip, we felt like were taking the accelerated tour.

We spotted bison and pulled into a parking area near where they walked around.

 The bison meandered through the grass between the hills and they seemed indifferent to people like us who wanted to capture them in photos or on video.

As we drove and stopped and looked, it was easy to imagine pioneers and fur trappers struggling to cross. Now it’s possible to hike on trails here and camp in designated areas beneath the sparse trees. We looked for them, but didn’t see any wild horses, elk, mule deer, or prairie dogs in the park.

Later that evening as we strolled into the town a rainbow arced over the small houses and rabbits played in the street. 

The restaurant felt like a western theme park. We sat at a high top table with dollar bills dangling overhead. TVs mounted on the walls played a constant loop of old Westerns from the 1950s and ’60s. That looks like Marshall Dillon of Gunsmoke over Barbara’s head.

Just off the bar-dining room, a bank of three slot machines had a steady stream of customers moving from their tables to the slots, back to their tables and back to the slots again.  We heard thundering hoofbeats from the Wild Stallions machine, but no dropping coins to signal that someone hit the jackpot.

Back at the hotel after dinner, we chatted with the night staffer on the desk. She, like the woman who checked us in, was from Tonga. She said she had a contract to remain through October, and while she liked it, it was just too cold.

But there was something beautiful about to happen; at 11:51 a Super Moon was set to appear in the sky over Medora. A Super Moon occurs when the moon is closest to the earth.  And this moon was called a Strawberry Moon, nicknamed by the Algonquin Native American tribe in the northeast and Canada, according to NPR, because it appeared during the strawberry harvest.

The town was absolutely still and there were no other people on the street. A few blocks from the hotel, the moon shone low and bright through the trees.

In the morning we had breakfast in the hotel’s dining room and then hit the road headed for Billings, Montana. Honestly, we wished we booked for a couple of more nights so that we had more time to explore the park.    

Read about Nick’s discoveries in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.