North Dakota - Briefly Revisiting Our Descent Into Hell

Hi Folks,

it's been a while.

It turns out that updating a blog regularly while you're bicycling across the country is a hard practice to maintain. Conserving battery life became a major priority as we made our way across the states of the Great Plains, so cell-phone usage was seriously reduced - not that it mattered, since we barely had service (if at all) most of the time. But we think it's important to finish what we started, so we'll be posting updates and finish up our digital retelling. And since I no longer have to thumb-type updates from within a tent using a spotty cellular network, formatting will be improved, and you get goodies like hyperlinks!

(Studly, am I right?)

We last left off crossing over from Minnesota to North Dakota. It had been a hard ride to get there (but when has it not been a hard ride? Oh yeah, Wisconsin. God....we miss you, Wisconsin), and we weren't even greeted with a "Welcome to North Dakota" sign to take a picture near. What a bummer. We rode through Fargo, which is one of those cities you've heard about but never seen. Well, it felt like a pretty flat and cluttered place to us - but on the bright side, there were plenty of bike friendly roads and paths for us to follow as we made our way through it, which was super welcomed. We trekked on to Kindred and spent the night there, not really sure what to expect.

A Daily Grind

The thing with riding through North Dakota is, there's really not that much to it. We spent basically the entire time directly South of the interstate, with not much to see or do along the way. Rather than recount each day's worth of grousing and struggle (because there will be much more interesting grousing to come, trust me), we'll just cover the basic points of this period.

Most people probably assume North Dakota just flat (or at least, we did). Well, that's not exactly correct - it's pretty rolling in terms of elevation changes. Nothing compared to what we saw in the northeast, but much more similar to those long, grueling ups and downs at the tail-ends of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The difference being, however, there's way less water readily available. Believe it or not, there aren't many people living in North Dakota (in fact, we had seen a ND billboard advertising "The Daily Commute" of an empty road). So it was mostly struggling through continued strong winds, hot sun, and upwards tilting terrain. But we persevered, because Rocky Mountains, here we come! Right? Right...?

(RIGHT????)

Bismarck and the Badlands

There were some pretty cliff/butte type formations throughout the state, so don't get us wrong, North Dakota is actually quite scenic in some areas. And we got to ride through Bismarck eventually, which was a pretty sizable city. We didn't see a ton of it, because our route took us through a small corner of the city using bike paths, but we did have to make a detour to go pick up some food box deliveries. The city was one of the few much needed reprieves in the state, and honestly one of the only actual cities we encountered on the entire trip, too.

(Yup, it's rocky)

We also rode through a Little Missouri National Grassland, which....didn't look too different from the rest of the state, but we assume there was some sort of benefit to wildlife within the area? We did see some of the badland terrain, though, which was crazy rugged and wild looking. Something that was nice, though, was there was a significantly lower amount of roadkill observed across the whole state. Perhaps it was due to the increasingly sparse water supply. Or maybe it was because there's nobody in the state to hit any animals. Or maybe there's no animals in the state either! Who knows?

Overall, North Dakota was kind of....meh. We knew it was going to be rough going - both mentally and physically - and it was. And at the time, we weren't super happy about being there. But the difficulties of North Dakota was really nothing compared to what was to come. We'll discuss eastern Montana next - Hell on Earth if there ever was one.