North Dakota - Day 29 - Wildlife then (dinosaurs) and now (bison, etc.)

Red Trail Campground, Medora

Thursday, 29 July 2021

today's route

We left the campground at 6:24 AM, almost an hour after official sunrise.  I'd wanted to leave earlier but just couldn't get us all put together before that.  I've heard from a number of places that getting to these natural areas at either sunrise or sunset is the best for animal life and landscapes, so off we went.

My "check engine" light came on again and held steadily all day.  Really, what good was reading the codes and following their instructions if the light's still coming on?

Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit

I'd read that the park is open 24 hours but no staff are around until regular hours, and that's what I found.

And I found the wildlife I'd hoped for.  Deer seemed completely unafraid of my RV and just casually crossed the road in front of me.

Oddly, I-94 cuts through the park - I had to drive over it - and I wonder what it does to the wildlife.

I'd heard there were wild horses here and I saw a bunch of them.  Neither they nor I were in a position for me to take a photo, but they looked just like horses so -

A thriving prairie dog town lives here, and most of them still seemed to be asleep when I first went by, though I saw a few.  And I saw a coyote:

look on the skyline

Shortly after I took this photo, I saw him cutting a path down right through the town here, and tried to take a video.  But I had to put so much zoom on it that the video shook too much for comfort and I had trouble following him, because he blended in so well with the ground.

And here's info about the prairie dogs.

sign, part 1

sign, part 2

different sign, part 1

different sign, part 2

see enlargements below

I saw a flock of wild turkeys including 5 babies - I never thought I'd think a turkey was cute, but these babies were.

I saw several bison feeding or sauntering down a trail, though I wasn't usually somewhere it'd be safe to stop for a photo.  Such strange looking animals with that huge head and heavy jacket and bare rear end.  At one point I saw a big bull rubbing his tummy on the top of a post.  This was one of those 4" thick posts that the Forest Service and people use for signs and to stop cars from driving somewhere, though this one was just an unused post.  Except the bison was using it.  It seemed to be just the right height for tummy-rubbing.

At one viewpoint, I stopped to walk the dogs and met a nice couple from Maryland who told me when they visited the North Unit the day before, they'd seen a herd of 100 bison.  They were crossing a road single-file, and the park staff had stopped traffic to let them do it.  The couple may not have realized the staff were probably also keeping people from making idiots of themselves by getting too close to these very powerful and very wild animals.

I passed a sign saying: "Coal Vein Fire Ahead - Do Not Report."  And this is what I saw.

It's not as visible in this photo as I'd hoped, but there was smoke
rising from that ravine in the foreground - and a terrible smell.

I found a lot of information about grasslands I haven't seen elsewhere, and it explained to me - for the first time - why I've been seeing protected national grasslands all over the country.

Saving grasslands is good, and this sign explains these small pockets scattered
around the country are better than not having them but aren't contributing as much good
as we'd all hope.

This prairie is special - it's never been plowed.

Native, never-plowed grasslands are rare, both
across the Great Plains and around the world.

On my way out of the park, I came across a herd of bison.

There were more to this herd - this is just the part I got in the photo.

I'd thought this sight was why other cars were stopped, until I saw that there were many more crossing the road to join the others:

You can see in this video that the idiots in the truck in front of me are hotfooting it back to their vehicle because - right behind them - is a real live bison.

After the herd finished crossing the road, I went on by the other vehicles (slowly) and saw that one of the bison had stopped after crossing the road and was rolling around on his back in a patch of dirt.  He looked just like Dexter does when he loses himself in the ecstasy of scratching his back.  Except a bison is a bit bigger than Dext so it was a sight to see.

Back on the road

I drove back down the 30 miles or so that separate Medora from Dickinson, which I think is the largest town in western North Dakota, with 18,000+ residents.  I was there primarily for the dinosaur museum; but after I visited that, it was still early enough that I decided to try to find new tires.

Badlands Dinosaur Museum

They bill themselves as having the largest number of dinosaurs on display in North Dakota - and they probably do.  I'm going to reorganize their exhibits into an order I find more logical than the one they presented.

Introductory material

their exhibits

What's in a name?

Their exhibit from the Triassic Period:

Coelophysis

Those from the Jurassic Period:

Allosaurus (with a really long tail)

Stegosaurus

And the Cretaceous Period:

T. rex - from head . . .

. . . to toe

The importance of horns or crests

Pteranodon

Triceratops

Finding an anomaly

A Triceratops skeleton -
note the crooked tail (see below)

Larry, with a crooked tail

When new information comes to light

Thescelosaurus

info, part 1

info, part 2

the skull they had been using

and the new information

resulting in the new skull now on the skeleton

An extensive discussion of claws

Dromaeosaurus

a guy with a "sickle claw"

The change began in 1969 -
relatively recently.

I knew we'd hear about Jurassic Park.

primitive wings - with claws

note the claws

a falcon (Kestrel)

The dinosaur museum had a couple of side rooms that I didn't visit - one about local history and another with natural exhibits.  In the lobby they had one of these natural exhibits on display.

pretty gorgeous

A walk in the park

The dinosaur museum is actually a part (the largest part) of a small complex of museums Dickinson has.  I took the dogs for a short walk around the park behind the building and found an exhibit of petrified wood that was discovered in a local mining operation.

The tire quest

I looked up the local tire stores online and, instead of calling them, I decided to just go and let them look at my situation for themselves, which turned out to be a good idea.

At the tire store in Bismarck that wasn't able to put on the new tires, they'd told me that I had different sizes of tires on my rear axle.  All I'd known is that the passenger side had much herfy-er tires than the driver side, but that tire place said that that herfy-ness effectively made the other tires smaller.  This meant, they said, that the differential was being messed up because the too-small tires had to spin faster than the right-size tires.  That meant that the right-size tires weren't wearing evenly with each other, let alone what was happening to the smaller tires.

I said all that to the 1st store I went to in Dickinson.  He said yes, but actually the tires I had on the driver side and the tires I had on the front axle were almost but not quite the correct size for my RV.  He said the herfy tires were the right size.  He said he could sell me 2 tires that matched the ones with not enough tread (rear axle driver side), but he said it didn't make sense to sell me 2 new tires that weren't quite the right size and didn't match the ones on the right that were the right size.  He suggested I go to another tire place in town that he figured would be able to help me.

So I went there and got lucky.  They could sell me the exact same herfy tires as on the right side to put on the left side, and he said someone who had an appointment for that time I was there hadn't shown up and hadn't called so he could take care of me right then.  He also advised that I leave the not-quite-right-size tires on the front, since they were fairly new and in good shape, and then I'd have 4 tires of the same size on the rear axle, which would let the differential work evenly.

And while they were at it, they checked one of the tires on the right rear side that looked too low to me and discovered it had a nail in it.  Very luckily, it could be repaired, and they did.  So I left there all tired up, so to speak, and felt much more comfortable about the situation.

Just as well because I still had to go back to that awful campground and deal with that ghastly owner.  But I'd had plenty of time to figure out how to remain calm in the midst of her temper tantrums and still get something positive out of it.  And apparently she'd used the time to figure out that in these days of social media, she needed to remember I could blast her to kingdom come on reviews, plus she'd thrown her fit yesterday in front of other customers, so she was much calmer today.  What she didn't know is that I almost never do reviews because I'm just not social-media savvy, but if she'd gotten any worse from yesterday I'd've figured out how to do it anyway.  But I learned my lesson: read those reviews.