Sunday, May 30, 2021

Cowboy Hall of Fame

 May 29, 2021 - Saturday

I had the Cowboy Poetry Gathering on my mind this morning, so as soon as we had breakfast, we headed to town to get information on that.  I tried to call but never could get a person.  Well, it just starts this afternoon, so we didn't miss it last night.  That was good--we will come back this afternoon. From there, we went to the North Dakota Cowboy Museum, another item on our check list.  It was more interesting than I expected, had a lot of cool exhibits in addition to North Dakota hall of fame cowboys, and significant ranchers.  And a 15-minute video, which was interesting.

Campfire
Chuckwagon

A cute "inside" horse.  I thought John and Bridgette could build this for Catalina until she gets a ranch of her own.

They had a room of bronze statues, which I really like.  These were amazing.  

Although I could easily have taken a picture of every single one, I tried to restrain myself. Here are some of my favorites.


This was my favorite.  It's a prospector trying to get his pack horses up the last hill.  It had a vein of gold at the top.

Joe found this canoe exhibit in their conference room that he liked. (He has developed a real fondness for prairie dogs since we've been on this trip.)  He also liked this lamp.



A group of 6 North Dakota cowboys were famous back in the day, and there is a nice bronze of them.  

These cowboys look pretty good from the rear, too.
This is the photo the bronze is based on. Pretty good likeness.

This was another really cool bronze, with cattle swimming across the river.  I wish I had written the names of all these down.  I think this was "Drifting."


We left here and stopped at a gift shop I had been eyeing all week.  It had a bunch of whirl-a-gigs out front, which are real eye catchers.  



I bought Joe a gift here, which he really liked.  A guard (prairie) dog for him.  (I mentioned he is very fond of the prairie dogs.)  He found the perfect spot for him.  Now he has someone to talk to.  We named it "Theo" for Theodore.

While I was in the gift shop, Joe saw a horse-drawn carriage go by, pulled by draft horses (my favorite).  So we chased all over town (all three streets) to find it again.

We grabbed some lunch and headed over to the Poetry thing.  The talent wasn't as good here as the one we saw in Prescott.  The afternoon session was divided into two parts, and I think there were 12 performers in each part, about evenly mixed between singers and poets.  When the break came, the seats were getting hard, so we decided to skip the second part and come back for the last performance tomorrow night.  The night performances are the more professional artists.  They had trouble with the sign, so the Emcee announced it as the "Kota Cowboy Try Gathering."  He thought that was fitting.  They did get it fixed at the break.
Performers on stage.

In addition to Theo, Joe added another item to the dash today -- a thermometer.  But he hasn't found the perfect place for the transmitter, so he has to work on that some more.  But it does fit on the dash.

We decided to drive through the Park again, an evening drive this time.  Dinner in town took longer than expected so we got a bit of a late start, and finished in the dark.  But we got to see the sun on the Badlands finally, and the usual suspects of wildlife (antelope, buffalo, horses, a deer, prairie dogs, turkeys).  

The buffalo and horses were grazing closer to the road tonight (going and coming, which meant in the dark on the return).  Here are some beautiful horses for granddaughter Catalina, who LOVES horses.
The background in this picture is breath-taking.

I wasn't going to count animals or take pictures tonight, but I just couldn't resist the photos since the animals were so cooperative.  We pulled off and watched these buffalo, with their babies, for several minutes.




And here was our first buffalo jam in this park.  (I love the sun in these pictures tonight.)


We only saw one deer, but it was in such a perfect setting, and it just stood and looked at us, so Joe had to take a picture.

The sun was getting low, but the reflection on the clouds was awesome.  It was a really nice day today (high 70s), although we did have a few sprinkles on this drive.  

When we got to the road closure turn-around, the sun had dropped below the hills.  Joe took a shot of the skyline, and we needed another one of the Jeep, of course.


We had to really watch the road on the way back.  We saw both horses and buffalo grazing right along the side.  It gets dark here about 9:00, and we got back to camp about 9:45. We drove 68 miles today, most of them in the park.  We had really great internet when we got here on Wednesday, but when the campground and town filled up with people, the internet really slowed down.  The campground doesn't have its own internet, it just uses the town one.  So I've had to use our hotspot the last two nights to get my pictures posted.  We are expecting warmer weather tomorrow, and we have the Poetry Gathering tomorrow night.  Otherwise, tomorrow is open so we will see what develops.

Friday, May 28, 2021

 Friday - May 28, 2021

After our long day yesterday, we decided to take it slow today.  I spent a couple hours getting yesterday's blog written, then when Joe got up, we had breakfast and did a little house cleaning.  I made a list of the rest of the things we want to see or do here, and we started checking off that list.  We headed into town about 11:30, fueled up, and decided to finish our drive of the South Unit of the Park.  Since they had closed the road on the Loop, we decided to drive the other end of the Loop to finish.  We go about 6 miles before the split, but the drive on the other part of the Loop was a waste of time, it only went about 500 feet before we hit the "road closed" sign.  But there was an active prairie dog village here, so we got out and walked it a bit.  Joe wants to sit out there and commune with them, but the weather hasn't cooperated.  It was chilly this morning (42 when I got up), but bearable.  I took a close-up of one of their holes, and we had several of them barking at us.  We did see 5 buffalo on this short drive, and 2 feral horses in the distance.


The little mounds are their holes.



We also saw this really cool bird, maybe a black-billed magpie.


The picture below is the black-billed magpie off the internet.  Looks like the same bird to me.

We just got back to town and John called, so we pulled over to talk to him.  I watched these rock climbers while we talked.
Made a stop at the post office, where we saw these really cool bird houses, made from old cowboy boots and license plates.
Next on our list was to check out the Sully State Park, just outside of town. This is a horse campground, with nice horse pens and campsites.




As we were about to drive out of the park, 2 riders came in, we think they might have been the camp hosts.


Our grand plan for the day was to drive into Dickinson to Walmart and Pizza Ranch.  When we left this campground, we actually dumbed onto a dirt road that took us to Dickinson,  right up Joe's alley.  We got lucky and saw more pheasants, 2 cocks and 2 hens.  We were excited to see these.


Further down the road, I spotted something that looked like a rabbit, but larger.  Joe finally saw it, and we glassed it through the binoculars, and it was a rabbit.  I told him if we had rabbits that large at home, we wouldn't have any bushes.  Joe googled it when we got back to the RV, and it was a white-tailed jack rabbit, which grow to 2 foot long and weigh 7 lbs.  That was what we saw!  It was too far away for a picture, so I got this one off the internet.


We were reminded that we were on open range when we came upon cattle near the road again.  None of them crossed, but we had to slow down for them.  No fences.

There were a lot of oil wells on this road, and the road was maintained very well.  There was also a tank farm for train cars, and a propane refinery.   We finally got to Dickinson about 2:45, and went looking for a car wash to get rid of yesterday's mud.  We kept seeing the drive-through type, and Joe wanted one he could wash himself, which we finally found.  It took a credit card, for 3 minutes and 40 seconds. I think he put his car through 5 times, at least.  We used a car wash earlier on this trip that took a credit card, and it just ran until you stopped it.  This one, Joe had to keep inserting his card.  Not sure what it cost us.  We did our shopping at Walmart, had lunch/dinner at Pizza Ranch (5:00 p.m.), and shopped a little at Runnings (I made Joe buy a flannel shirt, since it's still winter here).  Then we headed back to Medora that same route we had taken to get here.  Besides the pheasants and rabbit, we saw 7 antelope, some geese with babies, and 5 deer, 4 of them were our resident in-town deer. It did get up to 66 degrees, but with the wind, it stayed pretty cool (thus, the flannel shirt).  We drove out to the rodeo grounds -- someone in town this morning thought there was a rodeo tonight, but the only thing going on out there was them getting the grounds dragged.  But town was hopping!  Cars lined both sides of the main street.  We saw a poster this morning about a Cowboy Poet Festival, which I thought started tomorrow, but I'm thinking it started tonight.  We will check that out first thing in the morning.  We attended one of these several years ago in Prescott and it was a lot of fun.  All plans for tomorrow are on hold until we figure that out.  

We got back to camp about 7:30.  Our trip today was 119 miles.  And as I write this (10:00 p.m.), it's raining again.