Dickinson, ND
Named for the 26th president, who came to Dickinson by train in 1883 to hunt bison in the badlands just west of here and ended up buying the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn ranches. The airport is the closest field to Theodore Roosevelt National Park (South Unit) and the gateway to the western ND oil patch. Single 6,398ft runway with commercial service from SkyWest. Bakken boom traffic transformed this from a sleepy field into a busy regional.
A 32-mile stretch of two-lane road from I-94 at Gladstone south to Regent, ND, lined with the largest scrap-metal sculptures in the world. Gary Greff, a former school principal with no welding or art experience, started building them in 1989 to keep his dying hometown alive. "Geese in Flight" at the north end stands 110 feet tall, 154 feet wide, and weighs 78 tons — the Guinness world record holder for largest scrap metal sculpture. Seven sculptures total: geese, deer, grasshoppers, pheasants, fish, Theodore Roosevelt on horseback, and the Tin Family. Greff still maintains them himself, in his seventies. Regent has fewer than 200 residents.
Badlands country in western North Dakota where a 25-year-old Theodore Roosevelt arrived in 1883 to hunt bison and ended up buying two ranches — the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn. His time here, riding with cowboys and confronting his physical limits, shaped the conservation philosophy that later created the National Park Service. The South Unit (near Medora) and North Unit (50 miles north) preserve eroded badlands, free-roaming bison, wild horses, prairie dog towns, and remnants of Roosevelt's Maltese Cross cabin. The Little Missouri River winds through the entire park.
A 1,750-acre national historic site preserving the earth-lodge village remains of the Hidatsa and Mandan peoples, who farmed the Missouri-Knife River confluence for over 500 years. This is where Lewis & Clark wintered in 1804-05, and where they met Sakakawea — a teenage Lemhi Shoshone captive married to French-Canadian trapper Toussaint Charbonneau, who joined the expedition west the following spring. Circular depressions in the prairie still mark the foundations of dozens of communal earth lodges. Smallpox in 1837 devastated the villages; survivors moved north to what became Fort Berthold.
A 178-mile-long reservoir on the Missouri River — the third-largest man-made lake in the US, named for the Lemhi Shoshone woman who guided Lewis & Clark through this country in 1804-05. The Garrison Dam (1953) created the lake; construction flooded the Fort Berthold Reservation lands of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations, who still live along its shores today. The lake is 14 miles wide at its widest, with 1,300 miles of shoreline — more coastline than California.