Apr 29, 2007 - 14:10:21 CDT
Does life ever just overwhelm you or bombard you from so many directions at once that you think your head is going to explode? On Tuesday morning I was completely out of sorts, soul congested, in part because the morning paper reported that the North Dakota Legislature had indeed passed its trigger-happy anti-abortion law. Meanwhile, it was reported that the Republican leadership in the Legislature was more interested in determining who's Alpha Male than doing the people's business. My own life was coming apart at the seams on several fronts. I wasn't feeling well. Several deadlines were coming at me like a freight train."The world is too much with us," wrote William Wordsworth exactly 200 years ago, in another post-agrarian place.
And to top it off, I had a hiking date in the Badlands. For a few shameful minutes I thought about trying to weasel my way out of the hike, which has been scheduled for two months. But then I decided that the only thing worse than doing it would be to flake out.
So, bleary and bickery, I drove out to Medora and caught up with a good friend who had never climbed Bullion Butte. We coffeed up, topped up the gas, shyly compared lunch ingredients, made sure we had plenty of water and headed south on West River Road, toward what I regard as North Dakota's premier butte.
It is literally the case that once we hit scoria I began to cheer up. The vast emptiness of western North Dakota swallows the little dramas of humanity like airplane peanuts. We drove slowly with the windows open much of the time, engaging in catch-up conversation, venting conversation and compare notes conversation, but carefully postponing the big rich conversations we had been anticipating until we got up the butte into the really fresh air. Some conversations you have to earn with your legs.
Deer sprang around in the hollows along the muted orange and pink scoria road. Meadowlarks shot their perfect songs into the cab of the SUV - perfect in length, perfect in pitch, so much more interesting than the "hooo, hooo" or "kaw kaw" of other common plains birds. We each confessed that we desperately want to see a mountain lion, even if it winds up eating us, and we grumbled for a while about the new Game and Fish protocols that will result in more lions being killed for no good reason in North Dakota. It didn't take us long to realize that we were the wisest people who ever lived, and if Gov. John Hoeven, George Bush, President Ahmadinejad and the United Nations would just give us a call, we'd have the whole planet singing "It's a Small World after All," within hours.
That's Square Butte off to the southwest, and the outlier of Sentinel way over to the right, and you can see Five Point Butte way off on the Montana line. We stopped to take pictures from time to time, especially as we skirted the west end of Theodore Roosevelt's Maltese Cross ranch. I pointed out Chimney Butte, which was the name Roosevelt tended to use for the ranch, and we had a short debate about whether Roosevelt ever climbed it and, if so, whether he rode to the top or parked his horse and scrambled up the "chimney" portion. We decided that Roosevelt would not have been able to resist the climb.
All the while we gabbed and laughed and gazed about at North Dakota's finest (and most fragile) landscape, Bullion Butte grew and grew out the left side of the windshield, and its sheer mass began to dominate our excursion. We were going to park, adjust our packs, and then climb up to the top of the world to see what we could see.
What's your favorite butte? Many people I have asked this question have looked at me with a certain, shall we say, "detachment," as if to suggest that it is possible that I have far too much time on my hands. People have favorite books, favorite movies, favorite songs, even favorite places, but most of them, even North Dakotans who love the outdoors, do not seem to have taken the time to rank our buttes.
Bullion Butte is not the highest butte in North Dakota, but I believe it is the largest. At 3,336 feet above sea level, it is 170 feet lower than the highest point in North Dakota, White Butte, a few dozen miles to the southeast. Bullion is certainly the most geologically influential butte in North Dakota. If you look at a map of North Dakota you will find it northwest of Amidon, right at the center of the big sweeping oxbow detour of the Little Missouri River. The Little Missouri tends north and slightly east as it travels through North Dakota. The crazy erosions of the Badlands remind us that the Little Missouri knows full well how to carve out its path. But Bullion Butte proved to be too much for the Little Mo. At some point tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, the river just gave up and walked around the butte to the east, humbled but in no great hurry to discharge its silty load. The Bullion Butte detour is the largest diversion the Little Missouri makes between its source near Devils Tower in Wyoming and its mouth near Twin Buttes.
For the record: Bullion Butte, Black Butte, Pretty Butte, Killdeer Mountain (south), East and West Rainy Butte, Sentinel Butte, Square Butte, Little Heart Butte, Lone Butte. Some just because they are beautiful, others because I have had winsome adventures atop them. Your list?
We parked the car on a two-track road on the southwest side of the butte. Even though most of the Bullion Butte district is publicly owned, part of the Little Missouri National Grasslands, we left a note on the windshield saying that we were harmless geeks without guns or fire just climbing the butte to look around.
The temperature was absolutely perfect at about 65 degrees. There was just enough breeze to dry the sweat we worked up climbing the butte, which is steep enough in places to make you hold your knees and puff. We stopped three times to rest before we reached the summit. Total climb time: approximately 90 minutes. The top of the butte is a flat carpet of lush grass, with a bright rim of purple and golden cap rock all the way around the perimeter. Huge slabs of the cap rock have sheared off over the last thousands of years, and tumbled down the butte slopes, where they now lie like giants, waiting for the time when they will tumble lower and crumble and dissolve and head for the Gulf of Mexico.
By the time we settled in a grassy hollow on the eastern rim of the butte, in the words of Huckleberry Finn, "all my troubles was gone."
We opened our packs, pulled out food made delicious by the climb, opened a small bottle of what my hiking companion called "camping wine," and toasted the empty redemptive wildness of North Dakota. There was just enough breeze to fill us with wonder when we went silent, as the landscape encouraged us to do for long stretches of time. From any edge of the butte you can see the glorious, improbable Little Missouri River threading its way, glinting blue in the sun, the lifeline of the Badlands country.
There were thousands of purple pasqueflowers in full bloom at Bullion Butte last week. The bitter chalky chocolate was perfect dessert. We talked endlessly. At last we climbed down with some sadness that so perfect a day had to end. We prayed, in a secular way, that this magnificent magical place will remain just what it is: empty, windswept, a paradise of grass and spiritual restoration. Roosevelt said it best: "Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it."
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
GC wrote on May 5, 2007 4:59 PM:
Larry wrote on Apr 29, 2007 6:14 PM:
thunderhead wrote on Apr 29, 2007 5:25 PM:
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