Teddy Roosevelt National Park 2: This Time It's Personal

This trip was a spur of the moment trek out to the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Started off pretty relaxed, brought my friend and co-worker Nick Solovieff (of internet fame) out for his first night of backpacking ever, and couldn’t have asked for better conditions. The grass was green, the weather was warm and the Noisy Banditos (a notorious coyote gang) were blessedly absent in the night.

Got a bit of a late start, but seeing as daylight tends to linger past 10pm in NODAK summers, it wasn’t a problem. Nick and I started hiking south on the Achenbach trail at the Oxbow Overlook. We made a few hours progress and got to work setting up our campsite. Was nice hiking with someone again, as I had spent all winter doing my trips alone….having someone to talk with always makes the miles go by faster. Anyway, we hiked down to a nice little campsite, sheltered on one side by pine trees and on the other 3 by rock formations and bluffs.

As an aside, when I pick a campsite and I still have some light left, I usually drop my pack and scout ahead a little ways down the trail, a habit I have developed after years of sleeping in the “wrong” spots. Story time: when I was thru-hiking the PCT, I spent a long day in Northern California hiking through a relatively dry section of trail. I was trying to make up some time due to a setback a few days previous, and kept skipping water sources because I didn’t want to take any sidetracks. With no on-trail sources for miles, I found myself on a high ridge fairly late at night, looking thirstily down at some beautiful alpine lakes. I eyeballed the distance, calculated an hypothetical time for a recon mission(15-20 minutes, if you must know) , and headed down some talus slopes towards some much needed H20.

This simple little cross-country jaunt turned out to be slightly more time consuming and difficult than I had anticipated, and by the time I got back on track an hour and a half later, the sun had been done set and I was pretty dogged. So I kept hiking. And hiking. and hiking, all the while looking for a suitable place to go to sleep. I was on a section of dynamited trail that was immediately walled to the west by a sharp granite ridge and immediately walled to the east by a 75 foot drop, so basically the options I had for campsites where the trail itself and nothing. I really dislike camping on trail for a few reasons.

1. It inconveniences other hikers who want to hike later or earlier than you want to sleep. Having been on the receiving end of a trail-pitched tent in both the PM and the AM, I usually do my best to avoid it.

2. Animals often use trails as their “highways”, and even though I wasn’t particularly worried about a bear or cougar attack, I have lost my fair share of sleep due to various animals stumbling (sometime literally) across my campsites in the middle of the goddamn night.

So, I decided to hike on until I found a spot. A few miles later it was getting dark and I was falling asleep at the wheel, so to speak, so I chose the lesser of two evils, took a sharp right turn and started scrambling/climbing up the ridge. Once I got on top, I found an acceptable sleeping situation underneath a bristlecone pine that had forced its way into the rocky top of the ridge. The spot beneath the tree was probably about 7 feet long by 4 feet wide and surrounded by sharp edged rocks and/or empty space. Needless to say it was a tight squeeze for my tarp tent, but I managed to get in there just the same. Unfortunately, the spot that had looked fairly level to my tired eyes was far from it and I spent an interesting night tossing and turning. Still, managed to get some sleep and headed out the next morning, walked less than a mile down trail and ran into 2 things. Trail magic, in the form of soda cans and water jugs and a beautiful little campsite right on the side of the trail.

So to bring the story full circle, I always scout ahead a little ways just in case there’s a better situation just around the bend. In the case of The Teddy Roosevelt National Park Trip, there was no such situation, and so I got back to our campsite, started a fire and introduced yet another young backpacker to the art of burning dried buffalo poop instead of wood.

Weird Huh?

Morning came and went, and Nick and I went our separate ways….I onto a very interesting little backpacking trip, and he back to his battle-wagon.

Kept going on the Achenbach Trail, passing through some really nice prairie and heading up a few decent climbs. Came down through some more weird little formations and crossed a super muddy creekbed that was only dry enough to not have running water, but still damp enough to suck your shoes off. Kept going past a flotsom-riddled floodplain and the first crossing of the Missouri River.

Here it comes

Got across, and kept on walking. By the time I crossed the river a second time, the sun had been cooking me for some time and I was running low on water, so I hung out at a car-camping site on the opposite bank for an hour or so before I kept pushing through the day.  Took the Buckhorn Trail to the return section of the Achenbach and climbed up a steep ridge before once again descending into the dramatic river valley the Missouri has carved out for itself. While I was up on that ridge, I couldn’t help but notice an approaching weather pattern from the north, and rightfully concluded that it was my destiny to be “shit on” in the colloquial sense.

As it turns out, those clouds were part of a tornado that was beginning to brew itself up. While the actual event touched down a few miles north of me in Watford City, I got hit with the outer limits of the storm, a fact I am grateful for.

I’m used to hiking in rain. I’m from the East Coast and have spent a significant amount of my life in the southern Appalachian mountains where when it rains, and i mean it pours.

Tatanka

So it’s really no surprise that I just ignored the premature sputterings of the approaching NODAK gale, at least until I stopped to film a tribe of local buffalo, who were unconcernedly chewing some grass on the opposite bank of the river. 10 minutes or so later, I had made a ziplock umbrella for my camera. A few minutes after that, I was getting dumped on so I packed up my stuff and headed down the trail in search of a small group of trees and/or high ground to make camp and wait out this storm that I had so clearly underestimated.  Then it started really coming down and I was getting hailed on pretty good, my field of vision was reduced to a few feet in front of me and the ground beneath my feet was quickly flooding, which told me 3 things.

1. The ground was not sucking the water up very quickly, which meant that prarie grassland environments were apparently susceptible to flash floods

2. I couldn’t just camp anywhere, I had to find high ground and some sort of windbreak for my tarp tent to keep me semi dry and

Bird before the Storm

3. My normal technique for dealing with heavy rain, which consists of assuming the fetal position and sobbing uncontrollably until the storm ceases or passers-by stop to console me, wouldn’t work so great because I was in danger of inhaling some rainwater into my nasal cavities during my strategic hysterics. I really hate inhaling water into my nasal cavities, so I hiked on and spent my energy loudly apologizing to every single god I could name in the hopes that I would be spared for whatever insult I had unwittingly committed.

I was in the middle of professing my loyalty to Jupiter when I came across the first “improvised creek” which is a nice way of saying that the many small rivulets of TRNP were “fucking flash flooding”. This was a problematic situation. The water was silty and I couldn’t see how deep the channel of water I was trying to cross was. There are quite a few small, canyonlike 5 foot deep creek beds in the park that I knew of, and the prospect of taking a step into fast moving water that may or may not be over my head was an unhappy one. Being that the creek was also too wide to simply hop across, and I was left with few options with how to proceed. In addition to this, it’s common knowledge in the hiking community that trying to cross extremely silty water is very dangerous even without force of current or depth taken into consideration. The reason why is that the silt will accumulate in the pockets and folds of your clothing and weigh you down and drown your poor ass like an evil little swarm of nanobots.

So being me, I stood on the bank of this swollen creek and watched the rain recede, appreciated the subsequent rainbow and decided to cross the stupid thing.

Faced upstream, felt the bottom of the channel out with my Lekis and got after it. Got about halfway across before the bottom fell out and I was up to my chest in strong, silty current so I pretty much jumped out of the danger zone and hauled myself up on the opposite bank. in a few seconds, my shoes had completely filled up with silt along with the pockets in my sweet zip-off cargo pants.

The last picture

Unfortunately the silty  water also found it’s way into my camera, which began malfunctioning almost immediately. I shut it off and waited until I got back to civilization before immersing it in rice for a few days. Unfortunately, the silt got into the tiny little gears of the superzoom lens rendered the device effectively broken. The last image it took was of me rambling on and on about backpacking techniques that nobody cares about, may the god of electronics have mercy on it’s soul; it had suffered enough in life.

Anyway kept on trucking.  By this time I was soaked, getting cold and tired of backpacking. Figured that I might be able to make it to my truck and that if i did, I would certainly drive to a burger joint in Williston and spend the night in a warm bed.

Such an ending was not to be, as I came across a giant creek with 15 foot high banks. After my previous little adventure with crossing swollen creeks I decided not about to attempt the swim across. It is not in my life plans to die in North Dakota.

MUD

I camped out on the creek bank until morning, hoping vehemently that the water would die down by then and I’d be able to exit the park without having to create a cross country shortcut.

The next morning came, I got back into my soaked XApro’s, crossed the previously raging creek (now a tiny brown rivulet) and headed up to the Oxbow Overlook.

Easier said than done, as every single surface in the national park was mud. Just plain old mud. All of those cool little hillocks? Mud. The entire trail was mud.

My shoes weighed 10 pounds apiece in about 5 seconds. I was herringboning uphill. I’ve climbed up cornices that were easier than that. Took me about 3 hours to hike a mile.

Finally clawed my way up to the grassy crest of the climb and my truck. Passed by some buffalo that I tried to start a fight with but I guess they knew I was just upset about all the tough going and didn’t want to get involved.

Great trip, got some decent mileage in (all said and done, something like 25 miles RT) and had a great time. Too bad about the camera, but you can’t win em all i suppose. Definitely what I would call an experience building trip. Gotta learn the lessons somehow, but I dunno what I would have done if the funnel cloud had touched down on me. Probably would have sacrificed something to Helen Hunt, as I believe she is the most contemporary Cyclone goddess.


Pictures here and below

Some Video here

Stay Warm, Stay Dry,

Deer Stare

NODAK

Geology