It was a bit chilly, even for North Dakota this last week, but I enjoyed 5 days of shooting in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Western North Dakota. I arrived and set up my tent in a small snowstorm, but the weather slowly improved.
It’s one of my favorite national parks because nobody has every heard of it, therefore it’s never the least bit crowded. In fact, walk just a bit off the road and you are almost guaranteed complete solitude. T.R. National Park has very similar topography and wildlife to the more well known Badlands National Park in South Dakota so it’s a photographer’s paradise. Lots of textures and stark light.
I came back to this spot several times trying to get perfect light and clouds, I loved this formation, it looked like a movie set for an alien world in a Star Trek episode.
I can’t say I really got anything wonderful the morning after it snowed, It was my first morning out shooting and the snow only lasted a short time before the day warmed up a bit.
This is a petrified tree stump laying on it’s side along the Petrified Forest Trail on the West side of the park. I really loved this area, it was fascinating to imagine what this place looked like millions of years ago among these fossilized tree stumps. My only company was 3 buffalo that kept a close eye on me as I wondered around the hundreds of fossilized tree stumps littering the now arid Badlands.
The petrified forest is well worth the short hike from a gate on the west side of the park. Getting to the trailhead you drive outside of the park through cattle pastures dotted with oil wells. After spending days driving in the park alongside bison and the other wildlife, the drive outside the park is a reminder of what Theodore Roosevelt National Park would look like if the park was not set aside. It’s sad to think that the entire middle of our country had bison roaming just 150 years ago and such a small portion of our natural history was preserved. But thankfully to people like President Theodore Roosevelt, some of it was.
Bison can be very unpredictable and ornery and although I’ve never seen one doing anything aggressive, I don’t want to put that to the test. Maybe I’m being too honest here, but I have to admit I shot this from the window of my pickup. I know it sounds lame to sit in your car and take wildlife photos but I actually did it more and more as the week went on. The bison are used to cars passing by, slowing down and stopping, but as soon as you get out of the car they get more skittish about you being there. So by staying in the car it creates less stress on the animals, actually allows for good photos and keeps me from becoming tomorrow’s tragic headline. This bison was grazing near the road and I just sat and waited, and sure enough he came 20 feet from the car.
I did a lot of photos like this one, trying to find the perfect textures and formation to photograph an abstract detail like this of the eroding landscape. The funniest thing was every time a person passed by in a car they would stop and stare, wondering what I was photographing. I think they suspected I must see a bison or antelope they don’t. After a minute looking puzzled they would drive on.
These photos from the Badlands remind me of Cappadocia, a small part of Turkey. It is so similar, yet unlike the badlands it is always crowded with people and there is very little wildlife to be seen. These photos help me imagine how those places would have been before people settled there. The vastness of the badlands is fascinating as well as your photography.