Favorite images for North Dakota's state quarter have been narrowed to two designs, one featuring a pair of geese in flight and a second showing buffalo grazing on a western prairie.

Both designs include the sun peeking over the horizon, with buttes intended to depict North Dakota's western Badlands.

A state advisory commission, headed by Lt. Gov. Jack Dalrymple, is meeting next week to review the two quarter designs, along with a third mock-up, an aerial view of a 1950s-style farmstead. The group will pick two finalists, and commission members said they believe the geese and buffalo designs will make the cut.

Once the pair are chosen, the commission will be soliciting public comment on which design should be used to mint the quarter, and why each person who comments favors one design over the other, Dalrymple said.

The U.S. Mint is pressing for a decision, and the comment period may last only a few weeks, the lieutenant governor said Tuesday. "We're not going to have a lot of time. They want us to make a fairly fast choice," Dalrymple said.

Secretary of State Al Jaeger, a member of the advisory board, said the geese and buffalo designs both depict North Dakota's vastness, and the beauty of its sunrises and sunsets.

"That was kind of an integral part of what I wanted to see on whatever the final design was," Jaeger said.

Another board member, Sara Otte Coleman, the state tourism director, said both designs help to counter North Dakota's image as a flat, frigid plain.

"The two negatives we hear the most often about North Dakota are, flat and cold. Both of these work to dispel those stereotypes, with the terrain and the varied topography," Coleman said. "There's some plains, there's some badlands, and then there's the sunshine."

The Mint is issuing special quarters for each of the 50 states, in the order in which they were admitted to the Union. The Delaware quarter was the first coin issued, in January 1999.

The program allows each state to put its own selected image on the quarter's reverse side, where a bald eagle is normally shown.

The state's name and the year it was admitted to the Union are at the top of each coin. At the bottom is the year the coin was issued, and the motto "E pluribus unum," a Latin phrase that means, "Out of many, one."

The Minnesota quarter, which made its debut April 4, is the most recently issued coin, and was the 32nd introduced. Quarters from Oregon, Kansas and West Virginia will be issued later this year.

Although the design of North Dakota's quarter will be approved soon, it will not be circulated until late 2006. The design for Minnesota's coin, which had its rollout on April 4, was approved by the U.S. Treasury in June 2004.

North and South Dakota were both admitted to the Union on Nov. 2, 1889. South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds announced his state's final quarter design last week - an image of a pheasant and the Mount Rushmore National Monument, flanked by heads of wheat.

More than 4.4 billion state quarters have already been struck, according to the Mint's Web site. Virginia's quarter, which shows three ships that brought the first English settlers to Jamestown, Va., is the easiest to find, with 1.59 billion made.