Our 90-Minute Traffic Stop in Bison Country

A story of bison, a state trooper, and a surprise ending

Bison grazing this past April in Theodore Roosevelt National Park

The drive from Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP) in Medora, North Dakota, to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota is a straight shot. It's 250 miles or 4 hours, depending on how you like to look at it. In terms of road-trip measurements, that's an easy day of driving.

If taken in late spring or early summer, we've done both, the first three hours are a tour through flat and softly rolling green farmland with white billowing prairie clouds floating across the horizon. It is a dreamy scene, made even more idyllic by the lack of traffic. It feels like America before America got crowded.

For us, it always comes at the tail-end of our epic coddiwomples, with the Black Hills typically being our last ‘highlight’ stop.

This leads to meditation and quiet driving, where I digest where we've been and start to catalog our adventures over the previous four months.

But this year we arrived earlier than usual. The snow was gone, but every…