'Not a flat spot on it'

Nearby trail offers beautiful views, tough ride

By Chris Jorgensen, Billings Gazette | Sunday, October 19, 2008

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MEDORA, N.D. — Watch out for mountain lions, we’re told. And stay away from ticks and poison ivy and stinging horseflies and cactus. And watch out for quicksand and rattlesnakes. And it’s hunting season, so don’t get shot.

Also, don’t try crossing White Tail Creek. The mud is knee-deep and will pull your shoes off. And if it rains, you’re done for. One drop of water on that bentonite clay and you’re trapped.

And whatever you do, don’t get lost, another guy says. “You get caught out there the wrong time of year and that heat will turn you into a puff of smoke.”

We’ve come to this part of the North Dakota Badlands to ride the Maah Daah Hey Trail, named after a Mandan Indian phrase meaning “land that has been here a long time.” Has it ever. Petrified tree stumps stick up like giant thumbs, sprays of shell fossils tumble from stream banks, and in some places the dinosaur bones are so thick that they’re stacked on top of each other.

And right down the center of it all cuts a narrow ribbon of dirt connecting the North and South units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

The trail weaves for more than 100 miles, up and down, over creeks and rivers and alkali flats, around elephant-colored buttes, over vast grassy meadows and through groves of quakies and cottonwoods that already this year are turning Halloween orange and yellow.

As pretty as it is, and as gaga as the 50-mile vistas can be, this is hard country. There isn’t a flat spot on it. An elevation profile of the Maah Daah Hey looks like a saw blade.

Which is all fine enough if you’re on horseback or on foot. On a bicycle, you’re really paying for it. There are definitely easier and shadier trails, and less remote trails, and trails where you can spend the night in leafy inns with wine and satellite TV. But nowhere in North America is there a longer, unbroken mountain bike trail.

And, that’s one of the reasons the International Mountain Biking Association has blessed the trail with its highest designation, the “Epic.” And that’s why cyclists, along with hikers and equestrians, are drawn here from all over the world.

Bikes come to the Badlands

My riding partner is Dale Sekora, a Billings UPS driver who after wrestling boxes all day still has the energy to roll off thousands of miles on his bicycles each year. He has won both the Rapelje 100k mountain bike race and the Rapelje 24-hour race, and he spent the first two weekends in September riding more than 200 miles on charity events to raise money for multiple-sclerosis research.

To help us pull this off, we’ve hired Dakota Cyclery Mountain Bike Adventures to shuttle our gear from one campsite to the next. The plan is to ride the trail over three days, from north to south, and we wouldn’t have a chance if we had to pack our own coolers.

The company runs a bike shop in the tiny tourist town of Medora, at the entrance to the South Unit of Teddy Park, about 280 miles east of Billings. Dakota Cyclery is owned by Jennifer and Loren Morlock, a friendly 50-ish couple who grew up in North Dakota and have that laid-back and lithe look of people who prefer being outdoors.

The Morlocks were running a thriving bicycle shop in Bismarck when they got a call in 1993 from the Teddy Roosevelt Medora Foundation, a public nonprofit group formed to support businesses and promote tourism in the area.

Loren says the foundation wanted to buy six bicycles to keep residents and tourists active.

“I asked, ‘What do you know about bikes? Who’s going to maintain them?’” Loren says. “They hadn’t thought about it.”

So the foundation made the Morlocks an offer. If they would visit Medora occasionally to work on the bicycles, the group would provide them with a shop and a place to live.

“It was tough at first,” Loren says. “It was just like in the movies. We’d be polishing the counters, standing around. We had no customers.”

Then the Forest Service started getting serious about finishing the Maah Daah Hey, and the Morlocks joined scores of other volunteers on planning committees. And it’s the trail, they say, that has allowed them to make a living in “the place of our wildest dreams.”

Between May and October, the couple shuttles 30 to 40 groups to various places along the trail, and they’ve had clients from as far away as New Jersey and South Africa.

 

Putting the pieces together

The Maah Daah Hey traverses a checkerboard of federal, state and private land, and building it was a marvel of cooperation.

Ranchers were the last to buy in, fearing that their gates would be left open or they would be out rescuing city people all day.

Actually, there have been few rescues, and the gate problem was solved with an ingenious series of spring-loaded lift gates.

To help people avoid getting lost, which one guide book politely calls a “field situation,” the Maah Daah Hey is generously marked with wooden posts, each in sight of the next. Patrons helped pay for the posts and the lift gates, and many of them are marked with memorial plaques. Each post is branded with a turtle image, a Lakota Sioux symbol for patience, determination and fortitude, and apparently bringing your own shade.

The trail rises and falls along perilously exposed switchbacks, sandy washouts, boulder fields, alkali pans and long, fast, grassy meadows. For every thrilling descent, there’s a grinding, sweaty grunt back up to a dazzling view of something you’ll never see from a car.

About 24 miles in, and three miles short of our first night at Magpie camp, we’re weary and sunburned and hungry — and I’ve gotten us into another “field situation” trying to find some purported ice caves. We have to portage off some steep rim rocks and walk our bikes up jagged slopes too steep to ride, and never do we find the caves.

When we finally wobble into camp, the trailer with its ice chests and camp chairs is waiting for us. We set up tents, cook up a big, sloppy batch of pasta and then plop into the chairs as nightfall sweeps in the smell of prairie grass and the howl of faraway coyotes, and the stars slowly reveal themselves as only they can when you’re this far off the road.

Back to Medora

The end of the Maah Daah Hey runs straight through the south unit of the national park, where horses and hikers are fine, but bikes aren’t allowed. We slip onto the Buffalo Gap trail, which skirts the park and rejoins the main trail closer to Medora. It adds about 10 miles and the trail isn’t as good, but it slips through some of the best of the Badlands and what must be the world’s largest prairie dog town — actually, a metropolis. In this safe place, the chirping prairie dogs’ swiss cheese village sprawls across a narrow grassy draw for nearly a mile.

With the end of the Maah Daah Hey in site, we run into Lori and Barry Schwan of Devils Lake, N.D., out on a little day ride. They started cycling together four years ago and have ridden some famous trails, including Moose Mountain in Saskatchewan. But they’ve returned to the Maah Daah Hey for good.

“This trail is so much more of a challenge,” Lori says. “And other trails we’ve been on haven’t been this kept up.”

Dale and I try to swagger a little for the Schwans, like three-days on the trail was nothing for us, even though we can’t stand up straight and smell like bad cheese. Maybe I did get us so-called “lost” a few times. Dale likes a navigational challenge. And, we didn’t get shot, or eaten, or even have a flat tire.

Trying to describe the trail to his wife on the cell phone, Dale use words like “beautiful, crazy, weird.”

And to that, we would definitely add the word “Epic.”