6/1/13 Medora - The sun is shining!

Woke up to more rain and cool temperatures on Friday , so we decided to stay in today, get some wash done and just rest. We watched a couple of movies this afternoon, and then played some cards.   So far, we have had over 3” of rain with this storm and we are under a flood watch.

 Saturday morning the sun was shining!! So, we decided to see some sights. When we got out to the car, we had a big surprise. On top of the driver’s front tire was a bird nest, with long strands of string hanging from it. The time frame that the car sat there was from late Thursday afternoon through this morning. We felt so bad to have to move the nest, but better that it be done now, before there are eggs in it. So, we put it on a limb of the tree next to the rig, hoping for the best.

 Bird nest taken care of, we headed back to the National Park, driving the southern loop. This park is beautiful; there are so many different types of landscapes. Grassy hills that drop suddenly to form cliffs showing the different levels of sediment, making it look like they are painted with different colors. The erosion of the different clays leaves huge boulders sitting on top of pedestals, ready to topple at any moment. The recent rains have caused mudslides, rearranging the landscape again.

 The park is full of Prairie Dog Villages and we stopped to watch their antics many times. Today we even saw several babies, under the watchful eyes of adults, as they played and rolled in the dirt. We also saw a few lone buffalo on the grassy slopes, and some wild horses.

 After the completion of the park loop, we drove east on I-94, backtracking a little, to the visitor’s center for the painted hills of the North Dakota Badlands. Before we even got all the way into the parking lot, we find a small herd of Bison resting in the grass. These were older males, I think, they had the full beards of a more mature bull. It is easy to forget that these are wild animals and that they can be very dangerous. They are use to people and seem to take our presence with a grain of salt. But, the biggest bull can weigh up to 2000 pounds, turn on a dime and charge at 35 miles per hour!  So we did not let them get too close.  There was one point where I had to keep backing up as one was heading my direction and made me very nervous!  I was able to do facetime with the grandkids and give them really close up views of the bison doing very normal behavior such as scratching their backs on trees.

Here a couple of the beautiful views we saw:

To finish off the day, we went back to the ice cream shop and finally got our ice cream, it was really good!