That is as about as close to the middle of nowhere as you'd ever want to be. We are at the Dahkota Lodge (WARNING: Annoying MIDI), a ranch made mostly out of a double-wide in the middle of the North Dakota badlands. To get here, take I-94 almost into Montana, to the town of Medora. Then get off at exit 23 just past the town, turn off the paved road onto West River Road, and take 15 miles of dusty gravel road back into the great emptiness. It just doesn't get any more remote than this, folks.

The badlands are gorgeous. Incredibly convoluted landscapes of rain-carved buttes, grassland and cottonwood trees. The area was obviously inland sea at one point and the sediment layers are laid out along the sides of the buttes - all flat, no sign of later mountain forming. The contours are created by erosion. This was apparently a shallow marine environment. There's none of the shale you'd find under deep water. It's mostly siltstone (various shades of pale yellow-grey, very easily eroded, not much good for anything). There's also some sandstone from former beaches, Bentonite clay which is used in laundry detergents and other things, and occasional coal beds. They mine coal somewhere around here - when we came through Medora we saw an enormous coal train making its way east. The most interesting rock is the Scoria. That's actually just an Indian word meaning red stone - the more proper name is porcelanite. It's martian red, it tends to create a red stripe along the very top of the buttes, and it's what they crush and make gravel roads out of around here. I figured it was a natural stone, and the reason it's along the top of the buttes is because it's tougher than the siltsone underneath - explaining why they use it for gravel. That probably is why it ends up on the top of the stack, but apparently it's not natural sediment. According to the visitors' center at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, it was created when underlying coal layers would occasionally catch fire. Burn siltstone and you get Scoria. This is basically natural clay firing according to Dick, the renaissance cowboy (but then aren't they all?) who cooks at the Lodge.

The soil is crap. Eroded Siltstone can't hold water worth a damn so it all filters down to the underlying aquifer and about all that grows in the topsoil is grass and sagebrush. The only trees are cottonwoods - which grow down in the river bottoms because their root systems can go deep enough to find water - and scrappy little Juniper trees growing higher up. There's plenty of wildlife though, you just have to settle for lots of acreage per animal. So they ranch cattle out here, and there are antelope and mule deer (weird little creatures, they have this bizarre springing gait when they want to get away fast. All four hooves hit the ground together and leave the ground together and they just go sproing! sproing! sproing! across the landscape.) There are also prairie dogs. The ranchers hate them and I can see why. It's kind of like having your front yard infested with ants, but ants the size of...well, prairie dogs. They litter the ground with mounds of dirt where they dig their holes and they eat all the grass. Still, they're adorable little things. And there are Bison and Elk in the park. Huge buffalo, like big grazing pickup trucks.

The town of Medora itself (year round population about 150-200 although they'll swell to 5,000 in summer) was founded in 1883 by a flamboyant french nobleman, the Marquis de Mores. He moved out here with his wife, Medora von Hoffman (daughter of a very wealthy New York banker) and built an empire with his father-in-law's funding. Established the town, named it after his wife, built a big house that's now a historical museum, a meat packing plant, a brick factory, a hotel and a couple of stores.

He didn't have the best experience out here. He killed a cowboy named Riley Luffsey. I guess this bunch of cowboys came into Medora and somehow got into an argument with de Mores. Words were exchanged, and then some threats, but the cowboys seem to have thought that this was just blustering and shouting. However, they were actually dealing with a French nobleman, who took it all very seriously indeed and apparently considered himself challenged to a duel. He waylaid them outside town and Luffsey ended up shot. de Mores was tried at least once and acquitted, maybe more than once, but he came to no good end anyway. His business ventures all went bankrupt and he returned with his family to France where he continued his adventurous lifestyle until he managed to get himself killed by tribesmen in Morocco in 1896.

Apparently de Mores' problem was that he didn't know how to deal with the help. He hired a bunch of out of work cowboys and, according to Dick, the only good reason for being an out of work cowboy around here is if you're just a really bad cowboy. So de Mores ended up hiring a bunch of incompetents and badlands ne'er-do-wells and I guess they robbed him blind.

Teddy Roosevelt came out not long after de Mores and established a couple ranches in the area. He actually brought out a pair of Maine lumberjacks to manage them. These guys apparently were kind of dubious about the whole cowboy thing, but Roosevelt was confident they'd take to it and, more important to him, they'd guided him on hunting trips in Maine and he trusted them. Of course Roosevelt ultimately went bust out here too, but he had a better excuse. His herd, along with everyone else's was almost completely wiped out in the winter of 1886-87, which must have been one hell of a winter. One number I saw estimated that 80 to 90 percent of all the cattle in the area died that winter. Roosevelt lost something like $24,000. The rest of the herd got sold off and his main ranch, the Elkhorn, became more or less just a hunting lodge.

Eventually we came along, in the wake of Lewis and Clark, who are really big out here by the way. We arrived thursday, after a long and tiring drive with Lazslo. The drugs don't really seem to be helping him aside from the fact that they leave him too weak and uncoordinated to actually claw his way out of the Sherpa bag. They don't seem to knock him out any sooner. We're hoping that after three days of recovery at the Dahkotah, he'll travel a little better - but we aren't counting on it.

But we've been having a great time here. The people have been amazingly friendly and open. There's a trio of affectionate border collies, a lying old cowboy named Lon and his wife and a couple others about. Random squads of teenage girls periodically materialize out of nowhere to hang out with Tiffany, the owner's 18-year-old daughter who's pretty much running the joint. Dick's a pretty good cook, especially compared to the Flying J truck stop up at Beach - and we've heard stories here about the sanitary conditions in the kitchen at the Iron Horse that were none too encouraging, although I gather Clay is now going to have to keep his hair pinned back.



We went riding yesterday. That was a blast. The last time I was on a horse I was like seven, and it ended badly, but this was a smart horse so he made me look good. The weather's been mostly agreeable. In fact it hadn't rained since we left Ohio. It's been pretty cool here, and windy when we were riding out across the badlands. That got uncomfortable pretty quick. But today it just got weird. We were driving through Roosevelt National Park, which I highly recommend should you find yourself in western North Dakota someday. And the sky couldn't really make up its mind whether it wanted to be sunny or overcast. Then it started to snow. It was just flurries - it wasn't quite cold enough for it to stick, about 37 or so. But it was like being in a blizzard, and then the sun would be poking through the clouds. We drove to Beach about 20 miles west for a change of pace (as noted above, not our best decision) and it was simultaneously raining and blowing snow. Then, once we'd driven around Beach trying to figure out where everything was, suddenly the sun was out again.

Beach is the seat of Golden Valley County. Actually Medora itself is the seat of Billings County, but an actual grocery store - the Beach Food Center - and a population of some 1,200 makes Beach the area metropolis. (There are also the bedroom communities of Golva, pop. 101 and Sentinel Butte, pop. 79.) It's where the ranch kids around here go to school and where folks shop. According to a brochure we got, all of Golden Valley County has a population of 2180 people. The brochure, from the Beach Area Community Club, really does try to make Beach sound like a growing, modern city that you'd want to come start a business in, but they've only got so much to work with. Major employers include Home on the Range, a residential facility for "troubled youth," the aforementioned Flying J Travel Plaza and West Plains Implement, proudly serving all your implement needs.

Basically, not a whole hell of a lot happens around here, but the people at the Dahkota Lodge seem to like it that way. (I guess if they didn't they'd have moved someplace by now.) And it really is peaceful out at the end of the long martian-red gravel road, over the cattle guards and down behnd the butte.