Banded layers in the buttes expose geological stories in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
The old bull eyed us suspiciously from his perch on the hillside. While the other bison slowly grazed across the meadow at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, he alone squared off to stare at us parked on the roadway snapping photos. “You got a problem?” he seemed to challenge.
Not us, we might have responded. But, indeed, Teddy Roosevelt did have a problem in 1884 when he arrived for his second visit to the North Dakota Badlands that would later bear his name as a national park.
On Valentine’s Day earlier that year, both his mother and his wife died within hours of each other — the latter in childbirth — in their shared New York home. The fledgling New York State Assembly politician was devastated, writing, “The light has gone out of my life.” He had vacationed in the Dakota Territories the prior year to hunt bison and establish a cattle ranch, but he returned in 1884 to heal his soul.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park, or TRNP, occupying 110 square miles of the vast 1,500 square miles of North Dakota Badlands, is the perfect place to delve into silent, healing reflection, whether by oneself or with like-minded souls. Unlike many national parks, TRNP isn’t overwhelmed by visitors. My wife Dianne and I could disappear by ourselves onto trails, gaze alone from overlooks or contemplate in silence the layered, down-cut canyons of the park. And the visitors we encountered were often lost in their own thoughts and observations as well.
The Missouri River divides North Dakota more than geographically. To the east, enough rainfall makes the flatlands farmable. It has a Midwest personality. West of the Missouri River, the precipitation, topography and culture transforms.
Here the West begins. The dry climate lends itself to ranching instead of farming. The land begins to dimple. Hilltops begin distancing from their valleys.
But unlike the mountains further west that thrust upward from the grasslands, here the slopes drop down from the prevailing plain instead. Behind you the prairies race off to the horizon, while in front of you the bottom falls out and the earth tumbles hundreds of feet into the Little Missouri watershed.
By the time we stopped at Painted Canyon Visitors Center on the eastern edge of Theodore
Roosevelt National Park last summer, the earth had opened up and swallowed itself.
Occasional buttes and fingerling ridges still resisted erosion, but for the most part our hike there descended into the hot, dry remains of what once had been buried bedrock.
The exposed downcut bedrock displays colorful, banded rock formations, each layer silently speaking its story. Grey siltstones at the base hail from a muddy sea bottom 70 million years ago. Yellow sandstones formed from outwash when the Rocky Mountains began rising to the west. A thin, black band of lignite coal resulted from the compression of plant matter during an epoch of lush, swampy forests. Since then, occasional lightning strikes at exposed faces have set the coal layer burning and smoldering in underground veins, partially melting another sandstone layer above it, turning it into a brittle, burnt-orange rock layer called Clinker.
And the gray crumbly clayish rock near the surface, called Bentonite, was formed from volcanic ash wafting in from western volcanoes. Even today, heavy rains can cause the surface Bentonite to gel and slump down the inclines, creating long, gray beards across some of the cliff faces.
Wind and water have provided the final touch, sculpting the top layers into steep-sided, flat-topped buttes and capped pillars spookily called “hoodoos.”
Other curiosities include petrified wood from cypress forests buried in the volcanic ash and “cannonballs” formed when water seeped into spherical rock cavities, leaving behind mineral deposits until the cavities filled. The spherical concretions range in size from bowling balls to wrecking balls. Some lie scattered about the ground, eroded out from their places of formation. Some are still half-lodged in the bedrock cliff faces. And, quite likely, some remain hidden deep inside the bedrock waiting to be birthed sometime in the next million years.
On the Scenic Drive loop through the park’s South Unit, we frequently stopped for short hikes out to overlooks where the grasslands plummeted away to the Little Missouri, to hill tops where we scrambled amid the wind- and rain-swept hoodoos that poked up from the bedrock surface like giant toadstools, and to watch prairie dogs playing whack-a-mole from their interconnected, underground villages. A row of cars precariously parked along the roadside alerted us to wild horses sheltering in a valley.
Long before it became fully established as a national park in 1978, the remoteness of these hills soothed Teddy Roosevelt’s personal pain and helped him heal. His primitive ranch cabin, now relocated to the South Unit Visitor Center, features a simple writing desk where he confronted the curative tonic that “the farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.” Thus healed in the quiet badlands, Roosevelt ironically became a leader known for his bombast.
The transformative power of nature later led Roosevelt to become the “conservation President” who protected nearly 230 million acres of public land, including 150 national forests and five national parks, during his 1901-1909 administration.
The Park Service guide told us that the valley vegetation was greener than usual during our summer visit due to recent rains. But to Midwestern eyes the grasses and trees were still paler than our own Iowa cropland and forest greens. Colors at Theodore Roosevelt National Park burst, instead, from the silent rock formations.
But there was enough of everything for the Badlands’ needs. The wild horses could saunter down to the Little Missouri River to slake their thirst. Prairie dogs kept cool in their tunnels. Bison, chewing on the just-enough grasses, glided their hulks effortlessly across the prairie. Just enough loneliness to heal loneliness.
It’s mostly the wind that speaks out here.
And one bison, stopped stoically in place, staring at us, telling us, “Put away your camera. Listen.”
-- May 2026
Not us, we might have responded. But, indeed, Teddy Roosevelt did have a problem in 1884 when he arrived for his second visit to the North Dakota Badlands that would later bear his name as a national park.
On Valentine’s Day earlier that year, both his mother and his wife died within hours of each other — the latter in childbirth — in their shared New York home. The fledgling New York State Assembly politician was devastated, writing, “The light has gone out of my life.” He had vacationed in the Dakota Territories the prior year to hunt bison and establish a cattle ranch, but he returned in 1884 to heal his soul.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park, or TRNP, occupying 110 square miles of the vast 1,500 square miles of North Dakota Badlands, is the perfect place to delve into silent, healing reflection, whether by oneself or with like-minded souls. Unlike many national parks, TRNP isn’t overwhelmed by visitors. My wife Dianne and I could disappear by ourselves onto trails, gaze alone from overlooks or contemplate in silence the layered, down-cut canyons of the park. And the visitors we encountered were often lost in their own thoughts and observations as well.
The Missouri River divides North Dakota more than geographically. To the east, enough rainfall makes the flatlands farmable. It has a Midwest personality. West of the Missouri River, the precipitation, topography and culture transforms.
Here the West begins. The dry climate lends itself to ranching instead of farming. The land begins to dimple. Hilltops begin distancing from their valleys.
But unlike the mountains further west that thrust upward from the grasslands, here the slopes drop down from the prevailing plain instead. Behind you the prairies race off to the horizon, while in front of you the bottom falls out and the earth tumbles hundreds of feet into the Little Missouri watershed.
By the time we stopped at Painted Canyon Visitors Center on the eastern edge of Theodore
Roosevelt National Park last summer, the earth had opened up and swallowed itself.
Occasional buttes and fingerling ridges still resisted erosion, but for the most part our hike there descended into the hot, dry remains of what once had been buried bedrock.
The exposed downcut bedrock displays colorful, banded rock formations, each layer silently speaking its story. Grey siltstones at the base hail from a muddy sea bottom 70 million years ago. Yellow sandstones formed from outwash when the Rocky Mountains began rising to the west. A thin, black band of lignite coal resulted from the compression of plant matter during an epoch of lush, swampy forests. Since then, occasional lightning strikes at exposed faces have set the coal layer burning and smoldering in underground veins, partially melting another sandstone layer above it, turning it into a brittle, burnt-orange rock layer called Clinker.
And the gray crumbly clayish rock near the surface, called Bentonite, was formed from volcanic ash wafting in from western volcanoes. Even today, heavy rains can cause the surface Bentonite to gel and slump down the inclines, creating long, gray beards across some of the cliff faces.
Wind and water have provided the final touch, sculpting the top layers into steep-sided, flat-topped buttes and capped pillars spookily called “hoodoos.”
Other curiosities include petrified wood from cypress forests buried in the volcanic ash and “cannonballs” formed when water seeped into spherical rock cavities, leaving behind mineral deposits until the cavities filled. The spherical concretions range in size from bowling balls to wrecking balls. Some lie scattered about the ground, eroded out from their places of formation. Some are still half-lodged in the bedrock cliff faces. And, quite likely, some remain hidden deep inside the bedrock waiting to be birthed sometime in the next million years.
On the Scenic Drive loop through the park’s South Unit, we frequently stopped for short hikes out to overlooks where the grasslands plummeted away to the Little Missouri, to hill tops where we scrambled amid the wind- and rain-swept hoodoos that poked up from the bedrock surface like giant toadstools, and to watch prairie dogs playing whack-a-mole from their interconnected, underground villages. A row of cars precariously parked along the roadside alerted us to wild horses sheltering in a valley.
Long before it became fully established as a national park in 1978, the remoteness of these hills soothed Teddy Roosevelt’s personal pain and helped him heal. His primitive ranch cabin, now relocated to the South Unit Visitor Center, features a simple writing desk where he confronted the curative tonic that “the farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.” Thus healed in the quiet badlands, Roosevelt ironically became a leader known for his bombast.
The transformative power of nature later led Roosevelt to become the “conservation President” who protected nearly 230 million acres of public land, including 150 national forests and five national parks, during his 1901-1909 administration.
The Park Service guide told us that the valley vegetation was greener than usual during our summer visit due to recent rains. But to Midwestern eyes the grasses and trees were still paler than our own Iowa cropland and forest greens. Colors at Theodore Roosevelt National Park burst, instead, from the silent rock formations.
But there was enough of everything for the Badlands’ needs. The wild horses could saunter down to the Little Missouri River to slake their thirst. Prairie dogs kept cool in their tunnels. Bison, chewing on the just-enough grasses, glided their hulks effortlessly across the prairie. Just enough loneliness to heal loneliness.
It’s mostly the wind that speaks out here.
And one bison, stopped stoically in place, staring at us, telling us, “Put away your camera. Listen.”
-- May 2026
Capped pillars called "hoodoos" add to the mysterious landscape of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
Two bison stare down the author.
In 1884, Teddy Roosevelt lived in this now-reconstructed cabin in the North Dakota Badlands while healing from the deaths of his wife and mother.
Wild horses gather in a draw at Theodore Roosevelt National Park.