With fire, floods and Covid raging, could there be a better time to explore America? It seems to me we are surrounded by history in the making, because I don't believe the US is going to return to the conditions and circumstances of 2019, in retrospect...
"Speak no evil": one of three tree trunk yard monkeys outside Latrobe PA.
"Let's go visit history," my cousin Don suggested. Don is a retired hunting and fishing guide, and our main objectives were eastern and southwestern Montana, the principal scenes of Don's wilderness guide career. Yellowstone was planned next, then a return drive through southeastern Montana, visiting the Little Big Horn battlefield and Wounded Knee. In the end we went farther than we meant to go.
Montana is a huge state, about 70% the size of France. Every state in the Union is eventually measured against the size of France for quick comprehension, a meme that will outlive us all. Apparently France is why the chicken crossed the road. Seemingly no one ever questions our understanding of how large France is.
Unable to fly and then rent a vehicle, a national situation caused by the combination of Covid and economic brittleness, we could only drive. No longer were Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota flyover states; they became drive-through states. It's unfair; these states are replete with weird little features and points of interest. But the interstates only allow a distant glimpse. At the end of the third day of our trip we reached Dickinson, North Dakota, and considered our journey to have properly started.
Montana is a huge state, about 70% the size of France. Every state in the Union is eventually measured against the size of France for quick comprehension, a meme that will outlive us all. Apparently France is why the chicken crossed the road. Seemingly no one ever questions our understanding of how large France is.
Unable to fly and then rent a vehicle, a national situation caused by the combination of Covid and economic brittleness, we could only drive. No longer were Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota flyover states; they became drive-through states. It's unfair; these states are replete with weird little features and points of interest. But the interstates only allow a distant glimpse. At the end of the third day of our trip we reached Dickinson, North Dakota, and considered our journey to have properly started.
Approaching Dickinson, ND from the visitor center on I-94.
The hero of the southwestern North Dakota badlands is the Fort Union Formation, composed of Paleocene mudstones, lignite and brick, lying over similar mudstones and shales of the dinosaur-rich Hell Creek Formation. The Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation is separated from the Paleocene by the iridium-rich K-T Boundary, which marks the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and ended the Mesozoic Era. This was a big event in earth history, but in North Dakota and Montana it did not apparently affect the inland sea/lagoon morphology of the landscape very much. Deposition went remorselessly on.
The North Dakota Badlands: From the Painted Canyon Visitor Center on I-94 west of Dickinson.
The magnificent Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP) displays the badlands gloriously. The two units of the TRNP are intricate mazes with hard-surface one-way roads maintained by the Park Service, connecting to hiking trails and scenic walks. The two units are about 60 miles apart. The northern unit is well away from the interstate, features the upper waters of the Little Missouri River, and is more deeply cut.
Valley of the Little Missouri.
These clay formations are carved by water, and slumping is the main erosional form. The TR has spectacular examples of the kinds of iron nodules that form in such settings, originally as algal/bacterial gels at the bottom of what must have been somewhat stagnant lagoons.
Cannonball nodules, North TRNP.
Eroded gulch with cannonball nodules, North TRNP.
Both units of the TRNP have lots of wildlife: a bull bison looking into the window of the car.
Bison in the South Unit, posing for nickels.
Sage, prairie dogs, bison, turkeys, mule deer, antelope and countless other things milled about the TRNP in profusion. A painter or photographer might easily go insane in there. As Don said, most national parks are embedded in the present as preserved and protected lands. But when you look at the Theodore Roosevelt, it's as if you're looking back in time.
Striated clay mudstones, with bison herd in the middle distance.
Structurally, the Fort Union Formation and the Hell Creek Formation under it are composed of stream beds, river deltas and marine lagoon margins that ebbed and flowed across the landscape for tens of millions of years. Intermittent swampy forests laid down dense mats of plant matter, quickly buried in this depositional setting and gradually compressed into soft coal or lignite. The lignite layers are the softest element in these bands of compressed clay. When lignite becomes exposed on the surface the erosion is more or less immediate.
A lignite lens is doing very little to protect this ridge from erosion above the Little Missouri.
Fort Union lignite from Wibaux County, Montana--note bark fragments.
These soft coal seams can be ignited by lightning strikes or wildfires, and they may flame up or smolder for years or decades. A seam burning in the TRNP now has been cooking along for years. These slow fires bake the clay layer above into brick, or scoria. These layers of fairly hard red scoria become cap rocks protecting the soft mudstones beneath from sudden erosion. The whole thing is strangely architectural.
"Brick" or scoria cap rock. Loss of the burned lignite layers leads the brick to slump.
Another badlands cap rock: weak shale.
Other cap rocks include a weak shale, and at the highest point in the south unit of the TRNP the cap rock is a sandstone stream bed deposit. Sandstone concretions lead to the creation of hoodoos.
Little hoodoos everywhere.
Calling a bluff.
The astonishing prairie dogs and bison justified the trip, for sure, but the mudstone-lignite-brick architectural system of the Fort Union badlands is otherworldly. Non-volcanic scoria is a winning concept to this simple mind. It's fascinating to think of this natural structure as an extension of the Cretaceous. The Fort Union Formation extends deeply into Montana, where the Hell Creek Formation surfaces occasionally in Wibaux County. An adventitious local uplift of the Hell Creek near Glendive runs off to the southeast for many miles, and Makoshika State Park on the edge of Glendive exposes the K-T Boundary along with a massive cross-section of the Fort Union. The Yellowstone River has left vast and grandiose monuments here.
Makoshika.
Gigantic hoodoos.
Huddled masses yearning to break free.
The Hell Creek Formation is one of the smoking guns for the end of the Cretaceous and the extinction of the dinosaurs. Visitors come for the dinosaurs as much as the scenery. Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman has a world-class display and dinosaur enthusiasts might consider spending a full day in this beautiful museum, wallowing in catastrophic numbers of fresh dinosaur finds, room after room.
Meet the locals at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mt.
Other site-local exhibits include a very good display at the small Dickinson Dinosaur and Badlands Museum, and a noteworthy collection at the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum. The Glendive museum is Creationist, and I greatly regret not taking a photo of the Noah's Ark diorama showing all the plastic dinosaurs that wouldn't fit on board. But to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, "Let us cut us a break sometimes." When I was a child my plastic dinosaurs fought my plastic cowboys relentlessly. The title of this fresh series of blogs is "Visiting America" and there is nothing more American than Creationism.
Edge of the Badlands. Note chuck wagon and cattle drive in the middle distance.
Scenes of the long slow collapse of these Paleocene clay formations would go on to haunt us, butte by butte, for many, many hundreds of miles to come...
NEXT BLOG: A FEELING OF ISOLATION
RSS Feed