Crossing an ocean of grass

Day 25
Friday, July 9, 2010
Billings, MT to Bismarck, ND
424 miles

It’s amazing how many clothes we needed to stay warm at Glacier National Park as recently as yesterday morning and how few we needed by the time we set up our trailer in Bismarck, North Dakota, this afternoon. It’s partly testimony to how far we’ve driven, but probably more to do with the effect that elevation has on climate.

When we crossed from Montana into North Dakota at lunchtime, we had driven more than 700 miles in Big Sky Country since we crossed into America from Alberta on Tuesday, and that’s counting only our through miles, not those racked up sightseeing in Glacier. This is more impressive when you consider that we didn’t start at Montana’s western edge! Montana is HUGE!

Today’s drive was mostly boring in spite of varied terrain. As we headed east on I-94 from Billings, we went through bands of hilly country interspersed with flat lands. All were basically treeless and much greener than we remember seeing the desert on past trips. Then, just after we crossed into North Dakota and entered the Little Missouri National Grasslands, the terrain changed dramatically. Rugged-looking mounds of eroded stone approximately 2,000 feet in diameter protruded up through the ground as high as 500 feet. Their surfaces had a dry, sandy appearance and they were multi-colored with horizontal bands that ranged from grayish-purple to tan to nearly white. Elliot said that they reminded him of the rock formations in Capitol Reef National Park (Utah) except that they were smaller and less red.

Throughout the day, we saw farmers cutting a bumper crop of hay following more spring rain in the high dessert than anyone can remember. We imagine that hay will either go to waste here or it will be trucked many hundreds of miles before it could command a market.

We stopped for a picnic lunch at the North Dakota welcome center where only one other person stopped during the 30 minutes it took us to eat. We all thought it was one of the nicest welcome centers any of us had seen.

Soon after we got back on the road, we saw an exit sign for a town named “Home on the Range.” It had exactly the look we had pictured in our minds when listening to the song. Although we didn’t see any buffalo roaming or deer and antelope playing, it wouldn’t take too much imagination to picture them in that environment.

We saw signs for Theodore Roosevelt National Park and were briefly tempted to veer off the highway for a look, but when you are facing three 400-mile days in a row, you have to forgo some things…

We arrived at the Bismarck KOA Campground at about 5 PM local time. We lost an hour today because we crossed into the Central Time Zone. We were pleasantly surprised that Bismarck wasn’t humid, but it was very warm (high 80s). After living in the northern Rocky Mountains for the past two weeks, this sudden resumption of summer was a little harsh.

We did five loads of laundry, took showers and ate a steak dinner before reading the last two chapters of Sasquatch.