Frommer's National Parks of the American West - Don Laine [388]
Stores throughout the parks stock basic camping supplies, such as flashlights, canteens, and tarps, and enough food that you won't starve, but you'll find better selections in the nearby towns. In the parks, the Lodgepole Market has the widest selection available, including a good deli for take-out sandwiches (see above). It's open from May through September only, as is the Cedar Grove Market. The Grant Grove Market is open year-round, and during the winter a small variety of goods is available at Wuksachi, in Sequoia.
For the best selection and prices on foodstuffs, stop on your way to the parks at Save Mart, in the Mary's Vineyard Shopping Center, Calif. 198 and Ben Maddox Way, Visalia. It's an excellent supermarket with a good bakery and a deli with made-to-order sandwiches. Just east of Mary's Vineyard Shopping Center is a Wal-Mart, 1819 E. Noble Ave., where you'll find a wide stock of camping supplies, along with film, clothing, and practically everything else you might need.
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THEODORE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK
by Jack Olson
AS PRESIDENT, THEODORE ROOSEVELT PURSUED HIS LOVE OF NATURE and the outdoors by creating the U.S. Forest Service and signing the 1906 Antiquities Act, under which he proclaimed 18 national monuments.
He also obtained congressional approval to establish five national parks, as well as setting aside millions of acres of land as national forests and 51 wildlife refuges. As a conservationist, Roosevelt is arguably without equal among American presidents. So it seems appropriate that he is the only president for whom a national park has been named. It's also fitting that Theodore Roosevelt National Park is in western North Dakota, where many of his early experiences formed his later environmental efforts.
Roosevelt first traveled to the North Dakota badlands in 1883. Before returning home to New York, he became interested in the cattle business and joined two partners in the Maltese Cross Ranch. The following year, Roosevelt returned to North Dakota and established a second open-range ranch, the Elkhorn, which became his principal residence in the area.
During his frequent visits, Roosevelt led what he called the "strenuous life" that he loved. When he wasn't studying botany or herding cattle, he hunted, fished, and enjoyed the camaraderie of fellow Dakotans, some of whom would later form the nucleus of his Rough Riders.
Roosevelt arrived in the badlands soon after the last of the bison herds had been slaughtered, and he spent much time pondering what was being done to the animals and land around him. He carried those thoughts and convictions, born on the Dakota prairie, into his later political life. He wrote, "I would not have been President, had it not been for my experience in North Dakota."
Badlands & Buffalo. The colorful, broken landscape of the North Dakota badlands provides the scenic backdrop for Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Carved over millions of years by the natural forces of wind and rain and the tireless waters of the Little Missouri River,
this land is home to a variety of animals and plant life.
Some 60 million years ago, streams carried eroded materials eastward from the young Rocky Mountains and deposited them on a vast lowland, today's Great Plains. During the warm, rainy periods that followed, dense vegetation grew, fell into swampy areas, and was later buried by new layers of sediment. Eventually this plant material turned into lignite coal and some plant life became petrified.
Even as layers of sediment were being deposited, streams were starting to carve through the soft strata, sculpting the infinite variety of buttes, table-lands, and valleys that make up the badlands today.
As inhospitable as this land looks, it is home to a large variety of creatures and plants. Rainfall supports an abundance of prairie grasses and wildflowers, and 186 species of birds have been counted.
Mule deer and white-tailed deer inhabit the park, and prairie dogs have built their tunnel "towns" in the grasslands.