Back to North Dakota

20090831—Back to North Dakota

This morning I returned to the USFS Ranger Station in Lemmon and talked with two very helpful staff who gave a lot of oral and printed info about the National Grasslands program. I bought a map showing the FS lands from there North to above the northern unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I used this to decide to follow US12 to US85 heading North to North Dakota. Along the way I was entertained by a radio program geared to the Indian Nation (at the Standing Rock Reservation, just to the North), giving calendars of events and public service announcements mixed in with comments from a curiously unselfconscious host who made a running commentary on the announcements and the 1960's songs he played. I wish the station had a website so I could stream it at home. I used the map to walk some grassland parcels a bit and visit a small outlier National Wildlife Refuge, unlisted on the State map. I have a lot of literature to read later this evening.

I need to mention a wonderful metal sculpture in Lemmon built up from a couple thousand used and discarded items (tractor seats, belt link chains, skill saws, bicycle sprockets and many other things) all recognizable. Needless to say—I got pics. The sculpture depicted a larger than life cowboy riding a bucking dinosaur (the kind with a couple of horns running from his forehead down the middle of his face and with a large, wide frontal shield, kind of rhinoceros shaped). The 60 million year anachronism fit in nicely with the petrified wood park, only blocks away. Or maybe the folks there are creationists and the world is only 4500 years old?

When I reached I94 I headed East 18 miles to Dickenson where I scored some soy yogurt, then turned back West to reach the Theodore Roosevelt National Park ~5:00PM.

I checked into a commercial RV Park just outside the gate to get WiFi access.