Cowboy Poetry Gathering

 May 30, 2021 - Sunday

First thing we did this morning was head back to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering to get our tickets for tonight's show.  We caught the last hour of this morning's gospel music session, which was pretty good.  The stage had a nice skull arrangement.  One of the performers brought up a little vase of lilacs, so one of the coordinators added it to the skull arrangement.  Much better!

Some of the performers were quite good, and some of the songs they performed were songs from my childhood, which I probably hadn't heard since, so I enjoyed that.  

For the finale, they sang The Old Rugged Cross and Amazing Grace, and invited the audience to join in.

Then it was time for a short drive.  We tried to find a new road, so we headed west out of town, found a dirt road, which eventually connected to the muddy dirt road we were on the other day to the Elkhorn Ranch.  This one took us to the trail to the Petrified Forest, but it was a 3-mile hike, so we just took a picture.  We did talk to 3 guys who were heading out on the trail.

There is a sign at the entrance to our campground for a Gravel Battle.  

We didn't know what that was about.  But on this drive, we found out.  We kept meeting bicycle riders, probably 20-30, riding individually or twosomes.  We finally got to a sign that said "aid station," which happened to be at the campground we were trying to find.  We spoke to some riders there, and they were doing the Gravel Battle bike race, which was 40, 80, or 120 miles.  Joe had noticed red signs along the road that said "race," which apparently kept them on the right roads.  We continued to see riders all the way back to camp.

Joe also spotted a new kind of oil well.  There was something there called a Well Pilot Variable Speed Drive."  Joe drove all the way around it, checking it out (I'm sure we were not supposed to be back here.)

Continuing on our dirt road, we came upon the Black Water Canyon (not an official sign, but someone had painted that name on a post.)  And we saw our first wildlife of the day, 2 antelope.  We were about 30 miles in.  Shortly after that, we spotted 2 muley deer.  Then we started seeing the occasional antelope, we spooked a mamma with 2 babies when we backed up to get a better look, and another small herd of 6 antelope laying down.  Then we saw a big bird nest in a cottonwood tree with 3 chicks sticking their heads up.  He googled it when we got back, and he's pretty sure they were eagle chicks.  

The landscape here is amazing, badlands on one side of the road, grasslands on the other.

And the occasional strange rock formation.

We ended up by Camel's Hump Lake, which we had passed the other day.  We drove down to it (I picked out a rock I wanted, but Joe didn't load it.)  Pretty lake though.

I guess this is the camel hump.

From there, we dumbed our way back to camp, avoiding getting on I-94 except for about 1 mile.  It was about a 3-hour drive, 70 miles, it's now about 3:00.  We finally found the West River Road, which we had started out looking for.  We had a little time before the Cowboy concert, which started at 7:30.  Joe took a nap, and I watched the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game.

Tonight's show was good.  There were probably about 200 people in attendance, and only 4 performers besides the Emcee.  But they were all good.  It was the 35th Annual Dakota Cowboy Poetry Gathering here, and they are one of three of the oldest cowboy poetry shows.  Medora is a really small town, so it is interesting that this is held here. 

Someone must have sent me a new vehicle.  This Ford was right outside the Community Center, with my initials on the front.

Our time here is just about over.  We purposely booked in here through the holiday so we didn't have to worry about reservations.  So tomorrow we have to do our "de-camping" chores so we can leave Tuesday.

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.