At the start of the tour
Welcome to Theodore Roosevelt Scenic Loop Drive
Welcome to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, in the badlands of western North Dakota. This tour follows the Scenic Loop in the park's South Unit, about thirty-six miles of paved road out along the Little Missouri River and around through the badlands. We start here at the visitor center, make nine more stops, and finish at Scoria Point, a few miles before the loop closes.
The man this park is named for came here in 1883, at twenty-four, to hunt bison. He went home a rancher, came back grieving, and left a few years later with ideas that would go on to protect millions of acres of this country. You'll hear his story in pieces as we go, along with the people who were here long before him, the animals that came back, and the rock that makes this place look the way it does.
Here's how this works. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there. In between, I'll stay quiet, so you can watch for bison, horses, elk and prairie dogs. And if you meet bison on the road, stay in your vehicle and give them all the time they want.
Point 1 · At the stop
South Unit Visitor Center and the Maltese Cross Cabin
This is the South Unit Visitor Center, at the edge of town. Just outside stands a small log cabin that has traveled farther than most people do. It's the Maltese Cross Cabin, Roosevelt's first home in the badlands, open to walk through all year.
The logs are the original ponderosa pine from 1883. The cabin first stood about seven miles south of here, on a ranch whose cattle brand was an eight-pointed Maltese cross. It was grander than most frontier homes: wooden floors, three rooms, and a steeply pitched roof, an oddity on the northern plains, with a sleeping loft upstairs for the ranch hands.
While Roosevelt was president, the cabin went on tour. It was shipped to the World's Fair in St. Louis, then to an exposition in Portland, Oregon, then to Fargo, and finally to the state capitol grounds in Bismarck. It came home to the park in 1959. When you visit, look at the door and the outside walls: the graffiti was picked up on its travels. Inside is his lightweight traveling trunk, marked T.R., and a copy of the writing desk from his second ranch.
The town next door has a founder of its own. In April 1883, a French nobleman, the Marquis de Morès, claimed six square miles of river bottom here and named the town Medora, after his wife. He built a slaughterhouse to ship beef east in refrigerated rail cars. It closed in 1886, and its ruins are in Chimney Park nearby. His dream didn't last, but his town did.
History, on the way there
On the way: Skyline Vista
Next, we're heading to Skyline Vista, the first wide view over the river.
On a September night in 1883, Theodore Roosevelt stepped off the train at a rough little settlement called Little Missouri, on the west side of the river. He stood alone in the dark as the train pulled away. His wife, Alice, pregnant with their first child, was two thousand four hundred miles away in New York. He knew no one, and the locals had little patience for a four-eyed dude from the East.
He'd come to shoot a buffalo, and nobody much wanted to help. The promise of quick cash finally persuaded a twenty-five-year-old Canadian named Joe Ferris to guide him. The hunt went badly: terrible weather, awful luck, and few bison left to find, because commercial hunters had slaughtered most of the herds. But Roosevelt kept at it with a determination that surprised his exhausted guide, and he got his bison.
In the evenings, talk at the ranch cabin where they stayed drifted from politics to cattle. Ranching was booming. The bison were gone from the northern plains, cattle were being driven up from Texas to eat the grass, and the railroad ran right through. Before he went home, two weeks after he arrived, Roosevelt put fourteen thousand dollars into a cattle ranch, far more than his yearly salary. His biographer Edmund Morris put it well: fourteen thousand dollars was a small price to pay for so much freedom.
Point 2 · At the stop
Skyline Vista
This is Skyline Vista. A short paved trail, about a tenth of a mile and accessible, leads to an overlook with one of the park's first big views: the river below, the western horizon, and the badlands all around.
That river made this place. It rises in Wyoming, near the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains, flows north through all three units of the park, and joins the Missouri River in central North Dakota. Its depth swings hard through the year. It runs highest in May and June with the snowmelt, shrinks to a shallow, meandering stream in the summer heat, and can jump suddenly in a flash flood after a summer storm.
Roosevelt knew both moods. He wrote that the Little Missouri, like most plains rivers, is usually either a dwindling streamlet, a mere slender thread of sluggish water, or else a boiling muddy torrent running over a bed of shifting quicksand, that neither man nor beast can cross.
Whichever river you see today, look at the canyons around it. Every one of them is the river's work.
History, on the way there
On the way: Peaceful Valley Ranch
Next, we're heading to Peaceful Valley Ranch, one of the oldest dude ranches in North Dakota.
Its first settler arrived the same year Roosevelt did. In 1883, a man named Gerry Paddock built a cabin here, fourteen feet by sixteen, and made his living shooting wild game and selling it to the railroad. Nobody legally owned this land in those days, and it changed hands quickly and loosely. In 1885 a twenty-two-year-old from Boston, Benjamin Lamb, with his wealthy family's money behind him, built a barn, a blacksmith shop and a plain two-story ranch house.
The ranch's best-known chapter began with the Olsen family, who bought it in 1915. They kept more horses than cattle, and in 1918 they started taking paying guests: riding trips out to the petrified forest, cookouts, branding, roundups and moonlight rides. In 1922 the place formally took the name Peaceful Valley.
Carl Olsen also campaigned for a national park in these badlands. In 1925, and again in 1928, big promotional tours of politicians and park officials, including the director of the National Park Service, stopped at his ranch.
He sold it to the federal government in 1936. The ranch house became headquarters for the Depression-era work crews who built much of this park, and from 1947 it was the first park headquarters, until the new offices in Medora opened in 1959. For decades after that, guided horseback rides set out from here.
Point 3 · At the stop
Peaceful Valley Ranch
This is Peaceful Valley Ranch. The ranch house is the only original ranch house left in the South Unit. It has been expanded and renovated many times over the years. The log addition on the back, which served as the kitchen, was added in 1903. A boardwalk stretches between the ranch house and the stable, and three of the surviving buildings, the house among them, are on the National Register of Historic Places.
Picture it in the dude-ranch years: guests camping in the cottonwoods next to the house, horses saddled for a day in the badlands, a cookout at the end of it. Standing on that boardwalk, it's not hard to feel you've stepped back to a frontier ranch.
The buildings sat empty for a while, and the park has repaired them and is thinking creatively about what they'll be used for next.
Come back after dark if you can. The park suggests the area around this ranch as a good place to set up a telescope, far from the lights of town.
History, on the way there
On the way: Beef Corral Bottom
Next, we're heading to Beef Corral Bottom, which looks out over a prairie dog town.
Roosevelt called prairie dogs the most noisy and inquisitive animals imaginable. They are never found singly, he wrote, but always in towns of several hundred inhabitants.
French explorers named them little dogs, but they're rodents, members of the squirrel family, cousins of chipmunks, woodchucks and marmots. Of the five species in North America, only the black-tailed prairie dog lives in this park. A town is a maze of tunnels with many entrance holes, so there's always an escape route. The family group, called a coterie, is usually one adult male, several females and their young, and they recognize each other with what looks like a kiss.
Their barks sound more like high-pitched squeaks, and different dangers get different calls, so the whole town knows what's coming. They clip the grass short to keep a lookout, and that lets other plants grow, which is why bison and pronghorn like to graze in prairie dog towns.
One more thing: black-tailed prairie dogs don't hibernate. In bad weather they may stay underground for days, but on a mild winter afternoon you may still see them out foraging.
Point 4 · At the stop
Beef Corral Bottom
This is Beef Corral Bottom. Spread out below is one of the many prairie dog towns active across the park, and beyond it, the Little Missouri cuts through the valley.
Prairie dogs feed a whole neighborhood. Badgers, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, snakes and birds of prey all hunt them, so watch the sky as well as the mounds.
This is also one of the park's best places for pronghorn. They're the second-fastest land mammal in the world, up to fifty-five miles an hour, and their eyes can spot movement three miles away. They like prairie dog towns for the same reason the prairie dogs do: out in the open, you can see danger coming. Pronghorn aren't true antelope, by the way. They're the last surviving member of a family that evolved right here in North America, and they're the only animal on the planet that sheds its horns every year.
The grassland in front of you looks simple, but it's under pressure. Places like this are threatened by non-native plants that outcompete the native ones for water and space.
History, on the way there
On the way: Wind Canyon
Next, we're heading to Wind Canyon. On the way, the first half of how these badlands were made.
It starts about sixty-five million years ago, just after the dinosaurs died out. The Rocky Mountains were rising in the west, and rivers carried sand, silt and mud off their slopes and laid it down here, layer on layer, on a flat, swampy delta near sea level. Forests of sequoia, bald cypress and magnolia grew in the shallow water, alongside turtles, crocodiles and alligators.
Volcanoes across the West were erupting too. Their ash blew or washed in, settled in standing water, and became bentonite clay. Fallen leaves and branches built up in the swamps as peat, and under the weight of everything on top, the peat became a soft, woody coal called lignite.
For millions of years after that, this was rolling plains. The canyons came much later.
Point 5 · At the stop
Wind Canyon
This is Wind Canyon. A short trail from the parking area runs along wind-carved cliffs above the Little Missouri, then climbs to a lookout with an unbroken expanse of river, badlands and sky.
The canyon channels the wind, which rushes through before escaping across the river. Over the years it has worn the walls into soft, smooth curves and spire-like hoodoos, and scooped out hollows that great horned owls and other birds use as nest sites.
Now the second half of the story. About two million years ago, great ice sheets pushed down from Canada, reaching the edge of the park's North Unit. The ancient river here flowed north, toward Hudson Bay. The ice blocked it and forced it into a new course, which eventually drained to the Mississippi instead. The new course was steeper, the river ran faster, and it began slicing into these soft layers. It and its side streams carved the canyons you're looking at.
Roosevelt said some of the badlands were so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth. Standing above this canyon, with the river below, it's hard to argue with him.
This is also one of the easiest places in the South Unit to spot elk. They were gone from these badlands by the late 1800s, and the park brought them back in March 1985. In the heat of the day they hide in the junipers, so the time to look is sunrise or sunset, scanning the butte tops to the west for their pale rumps against the grass and sky.
History, on the way there
On the way: Boicourt Overlook
Next, we're heading to Boicourt Overlook. On the way, the hardest chapter of Roosevelt's years out here.
In February 1884, back in New York, a telegram brought news of the birth of his first child, a daughter. Then a second telegram called him home: his wife and his mother were both seriously ill. On Valentine's Day, his mother died of typhoid fever. Hours later, at another bedside, his wife Alice died. In his diary he drew a large X and wrote a single line: The light has gone out of my life.
That June he came back to the badlands, thinking he might spend the rest of his days as a cattleman. Looking for solitude, he rode north down the Little Missouri and started a second ranch, the Elkhorn, about thirty-five miles from town. He worked roundups, helped organize a stockmen's association, and wrote his first book about life in the West.
The ranching didn't last. Too many cattle had been crowded onto the range. In 1886 a late thaw and a scorching summer left little grass, and then came a winter of blizzard after blizzard, at temperatures as low as forty-one below. Nearly eighty percent of the cattle in the badlands died. Roosevelt lost more than half his herd and began to sell out.
He lost a fortune here. But he called the badlands the place where the romance of his life began.
Point 6 · At the stop
Boicourt Overlook
This is Boicourt Overlook. Roosevelt described these badlands as a land of vast, silent spaces, and here you can see what he meant. The broken, rolling country runs off toward the horizon, and you can see past the park boundary, where some of the larger buttes in the area stand silhouetted against the sky.
A paved trail, about two-tenths of a mile and fully accessible, leads out above the badlands from the pullout, and an unpaved path carries on to another overlook, a good place to watch the sunset.
Look at how the buttes are built. Each layer of rock wears away at its own speed. Hard sandstone acts as a protective cap over softer clay below it, and where a cap survives, a butte or a pillar survives under it. Roosevelt's fantastically broken badlands are really just soft rock and hard rock taking turns.
The open flats beyond the overlook are another of the park's favorite places for pronghorn, so keep your eyes on the grass as well as the skyline.
History, on the way there
On the way: Buck Hill
Next, we're heading to Buck Hill, one of the highest points in the park.
Roosevelt took more home from the badlands than a ranching loss. He had watched the range overgrazed, and seen the bison, elk, bighorn sheep and deer hunted out of this country. In 1887 he helped found the Boone and Crockett Club, one of the nation's first fair-hunting organizations.
When he became president in 1901, he used the office to protect land on a scale no one had tried before. He created the United States Forest Service, a hundred and fifty national forests, fifty-one federal bird reserves, four national game preserves and five national parks. In 1906 he signed the Antiquities Act, and used it to declare eighteen national monuments, among them Devils Tower and the Grand Canyon. About two hundred thirty million acres in all.
He put the idea this way: We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.
And he never forgot where it began. Years later he said: I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.
Point 7 · At the stop
Buck Hill
This is Buck Hill, the highest point in the park you can reach by road. A short, steep trail, paved at first and dirt near the top, climbs about two-tenths of a mile to a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. On a clear day you can see for miles, from Painted Canyon to Boicourt and beyond, just by turning in a circle.
At the top, look closely at the rock around you. You may be able to spot ripples in the stone. This high point used to be the bottom of an ancient streambed.
Buck Hill is also one of the best places in the park for stargazing, with nothing in the way of the sky. The park sits more than thirty miles from the nearest large city, and the air is exceptionally clean. On a clear night you can see the Milky Way and the planets, even the Andromeda Galaxy without a telescope, and once in a while the northern lights. The park likes to say that half the park is after dark.
The darkness isn't guaranteed. Light from oil and gas development around the park is visible in some places, so the farther you are from it, the more of the sky you get.
History, on the way there
On the way: Old East Entrance
Next, we're heading to the Old East Entrance, built by hand during the Great Depression.
In 1933, Congress created the Civilian Conservation Corps to put young, unemployed men to work. Over its nine years it employed about three million of them across the country. Three companies arrived in these badlands in 1934, about two hundred men each. They lived in tents until they'd built their own camps: barracks, a mess hall, classrooms, even a small hospital and a post office.
The men were seventeen to twenty-three years old. They signed on for six months at a time and earned thirty dollars a month, and most of that went home to their families. With little more than strong backs, shovels and picks, they built roads, trails and culverts, and they quarried the local sandstone themselves, with star drills, sledgehammers and sweat.
Here in the South Unit, they built the old entrance station, the stone entrance pylons, and parts of the park's roads and trails. Fifty years later, one of them remembered it like this: You learned how to live with other men, you learned self-esteem, you learned about yourself.
Point 8 · At the stop
Old East Entrance
This is the trailhead for the Old East Entrance. The station itself is a walk of about four-tenths of a mile from here, through one of the park's active prairie dog towns, and the park says it's worth it.
The corps built it in 1938, as a Depression relief project, and it's a beautiful example of hand-hewn stone masonry. For three decades this was the front door of the park. When the memorial park was dedicated in 1949, a stream of cars came in through the East Entrance for the ceremony.
Then, in 1968, Interstate 94 replaced old U.S. Highway 10, and the park entrance moved to the town by the river. The station fell out of use. Its original stone sign survives at the Painted Canyon Visitor Center, beside the interstate.
It harks back to an earlier time in the national parks, when a country in its hardest years put young men to work, and they built places like this to last.
History, on the way there
On the way: Badlands Overlook
Next, we're heading to Badlands Overlook. On the way, how this land became a park, which took almost thirty years.
Theodore Roosevelt died in January 1919, and soon people were proposing memorials. His old ranching partner Sylvane Ferris picked a committee, and it chose Medora. In 1925, a tour of cowboys and Congressmen camped their way through what they called the Grand Canyon of the Little Missouri. Then, in 1928, an official report to the Park Service concluded: A national park does not seem to be justified.
Then came the dirty thirties. Drought, overgrazing and crop failures forced homesteaders to sell their land to the government, for as little as two dollars an acre, and the Depression work crews moved in. Even so, a bill to create a park was vetoed, and in 1946 this land became a national wildlife refuge instead.
A North Dakota congressman kept pushing. On April 25, 1947, President Truman signed the bill creating Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park, the only memorial park of its kind in the whole system. On November 10, 1978, it became a full national park.
Point 9 · At the stop
Badlands Overlook
This is Badlands Overlook, one of the best vistas in the park, with a panoramic look at the broken, rolling badlands spread out below. It's a fine spot at sunrise, and for picking out elk or bison wandering among the buttes.
The same 1978 law that made this a national park placed nearly thirty thousand acres of it in the National Wilderness Preservation System.
And this landscape is still moving. Rain here averages only about fifteen inches a year, but it tends to come in heavy downpours. Water running downhill cuts gullies into the soft clay. Water that soaks in adds weight, and sometimes whole sections of hillside break loose and slide. The badlands are not finished. They never will be.
History, on the way there
On the way: Scoria Point Overlook
Next, we're heading to Scoria Point, the last stop on this tour. On the way, the story of the road under your wheels.
In 2019, severe rain set off slides along this part of the loop, and the badlands began, quite literally, to take the road away. About four miles of it partly collapsed on the unstable soil, and engineers found two more miles likely to fail. For six years, the loop wasn't a loop: visitors went out and came back the same way.
Construction began in 2022. Crews improved the drainage, rebuilt the road base, regraded slopes, stabilized banks, and improved the pullouts and parking along the way. The work covered more than six miles and cost about fifty-one million dollars. On November 25, 2025, the full loop opened again.
About a hundred thousand vehicles travel this road every year. The soft clay that makes the badlands so beautiful is exactly what makes them so hard to build on.
Point 10 · At the stop
Scoria Point Overlook
This is Scoria Point. It's named for scoria, the reddish rock that caps so many of the buttes in these badlands: clay and sand baked hard by coal seams that burned long ago. From here you can take in the broken badlands formations, and keep watching for wildlife like bison.
That's the end of the tour. Think back over what you've seen: a cabin that crossed the country and came home, a ranch that welcomed the first tourists, bison and elk brought back after they were gone, and an old stone gate built by young men with hand tools.
The cattle boom went bust, and Roosevelt's ranches didn't make him rich. But the land he rode is preserved much as he saw it, with the same sights, sounds and smells he wrote about. That was always the point of this place. Thanks for taking the tour with me.