You can see why it ranks 100th in visitorship of the national parks, with a little more than half a million per year.īut of course, that’s also the appeal. You know you’re far away from civilization when South Dakota is the closest thing to you.
That’s why we used the closest jumping off point, Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a mere 4 hours away. You’re not coming from Winnipeg, Canada, you say? In that case, it’s only 8 hours from Minneapolis, 9 hours from Denver, and 6 hours from Yellowstone. Getting there is a breezy 8 hour drive from Winnipeg, Canada.
Watch the Ken Burns documentary of the National Parks, if you have not been able to see one in person.Theodore Roosevelt National Park is located in western North Dakota. When you see them, it is obvious why they were set aside to be untrammeled: they are national treasures. These are areas of insane natural beauty, wild, vast, often inhospitable. The people who lived in the area that became Shenandoah NP (est 1935) were not so lucky.many of them had to be forcibly removed from their farms and homesteads. They were 'grandfathered' into the the Park. There are still families whose ancestors homesteaded in Glacier (est 1910), for example, who have been allowed to keep the buildings to be passed down to future family members. There were already settlers in some of the areas that became NP's. Red River Gorge National Park in West Virginia was just created in December of 2020. This also ignores the fact that the vast majority of NP's were created long after he left office in 1909, and are in fact still being created. Platt, OK (now the Chickasaw National Recreation Area, no longer a NP) Sully's Hill, ND (now a game preserve, no longer a NP) When he became President in 1901 there were already 4 National Parks: Just a shower thought, but if I ever go to one of these parks, I, like Teddy, will be entering with sufficient firepower to drop anything on four legs, or two for that matter. 44 magnum at home, crosses paths with one of these creatures. What if strange things really do lurk in the national parks, a final refuge for those creatures well known to Natives for thousands of years, that only earlier settlers had the displeasure of meeting and every so often some poor soul who left their. What if the impetus for the creation of the national parks themselves was to preserve something that lived in those areas, or to protect settlers from imposing on its domain. This is all that I have been able to find that he himself wrote, or was reported, but what if he knew more. It has been reported that he was also disposed to believe Daniel Boone's story of the Ozark Howler, and that he once considered postponing an African Hunting trip to instead go after the snallygaster. We know he wrote about at least one of these stories, of Bigfoot, that he was quite taken with, and disposed to believe. He saw many things, and heard many stories through his life, including stories of cryptids. Teddy Roosevelt was an avid outdoors-man and hunter. I'm not sure if this goes here but I'll post and let the downvotes be the judge