No place shaped the man who became president more than the North Dakota badlands, where a young, grieving Theodore Roosevelt came to ranch in the eighteen-eighties and found in the broken country a cure for his sorrows and a lifelong conservation ethic. The national park that now bears his name preserves that country in three units along the Little Missouri River.

Where the Bison Still Roam

The park is the wild heart of the state — a land of banded buttes, sage flats and cottonwood bottoms where bison graze the roadsides, prairie dogs stand sentinel over their towns, and bands of feral horses drift across the ridges. Elk bugle in the autumn, and the coyote's song carries far in the still night air.

From the almanac's reckoning:

• The park preserves the badlands country where Roosevelt ranched in the 1880s.
• Bison, feral horses, elk and prairie dogs range across its three units.
• The Little Missouri River threads the length of the badlands.

Visitors drive the scenic loops, hike the buttes at dawn, and stand at the canyon rims where Roosevelt once stood. The almanac reckons the park among the state's greatest treasures — a place that made a conservationist of a president, and still makes one of nearly everyone who lingers there.