Stealth canyon attack

We’ve been hearing about Medora and the Theodore Roosevelt National Park for a while now but didn’t really know what the deal was with them. Biking west from Dickinson today was the same pretty but somewhat monotonous rolling pastureland, until we creaked up one particular rise and BOOM!! this happened:

Whoa. So this explains what the deal is.

Biking along interstate 94, we discovered another animal that is terrified of bikes: prairie dogs. We passed a big prairie dog town alongside the highway, and they all stood up at the openings of their burrows and “chip!” “chip!”ped in warning to their neighbors until we passed.

We’ll be in Medora, a tourist-focused genuine-turned-faux Old West town for two nights. Our campsite backs up to the Little Missouri River:

Tomorrow will have some nasty headwinds, so it’s a good opportunity to explore the national park. The park has over 500 bison that live here (sadly with no Tevatron to play with) in addition to prairie dogs and the great scenery. A little history: Teddy Roosevelt first came here as a 24-year-old to shoot his first bison and was so wowed by the experience that he decided to become President and found the National Park Service. Something like that.

In other news, we met our first ACA eastbound cyclists today, in the bike shop in Medora. These guys are ahead of schedule a couple days because they hitched a ride into town when their bikes broke down, but there should be many more where they came from in the few weeks ahead. (Because the passes just opened over the Rockies, it’s impossible for anyone to have left the West Coast more than a few weeks ago.) We warned them about Gackle and bid them a good journey.