Boy howdy we’re out west now! The 64 mile road to Teddy Roosevelt National Park (more accurately Medora, ND) began this morning with a fresh set of blustery headwinds: the kind that make your bike wobble fresh. We steadily made our way out of Richardton and past miles and miles of fields with a couple of small towns in between. If every ounce of pity a motorist has experienced watching us crank endlessly into the wind and hills was worth a dollar would we have a lot of dollars. It was getting hard to believe that we were going to arrive to a national park later that day, but we were getting somewhere! After a lot of peanut butter and bananas, the winds let up a little and we made our way further west bit by bit. Then the endless fields transformed before our very eyes into a dazzling array of river-carved canyons and buttes (and the road turned to gravel hah) .
We reached the part of North Dakota that never got flattened out by glaciers and got to experience an amazing descent into a valley of rock formations. While we did enter Mountain Time the day before, this felt like something new entirely. Cattle crossed right in front of us instead of being separated by a fence and then we saw… horses? Yes, really, the wild sort.
Rightfully inspired, Pearl, Jake, and I created our video for sweep’s Disney themed challenge on a hay bale with the colorful patterned hills in the background. We crushed some more pebbles, and after ascending a massive hill we cruised into Teddy Roosevelt National Park and were surrounded on all sides by exposed stone and scrubby plants. It was a wild feeling, but also so exciting. With some time before dinner, people dispersed to shower and explore Medora, a tiny town bordering the park that explodes during the tourist season. Dinner was pizza provided in the park at Cottonwood campground by an alum’s parents. We got to watch the sun set over the badlands and bask in the fact that we really did bike all the way here.
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