Magnus Goes North With Summer, Day 9

Wednesday June 4

Another day at lovely Fort Ransom.  I saw some birds: Least Flycatcher (life bird!), Yellow Warbler, Chipping Sparrow, Red-eyed Vireo, Brown-Headed Cowbird.  And thousands of robins. Apparently wherever there are lot of robins there are also lot of other birds. Or is that the other way around?

We made the mistake—sort of—of driving to the Sheyenne National Grasslands river access points. Here is how it happened. 

During the previous day’s drive, after ignoring the highway sign to the Fort Ransom park, we had trouble finding a non-gravel road route back to the turnoff. The trucker app was hopeless, and on google maps I had questions about whether or not a road was gravel or paved.  The best route appeared to be to take the road we had driven west on all the way over to ND-1, but google implied that took us on a dirt road. 

So we went out to see.  It was only a few miles drive; we were able to easily figure out the best route to take in the Magnus Motorhome next day; and Ed had a chance to test out the app carefully and discover that its directions were a couple of miles behind reality. An unacceptable lag.  Since we’d had a bit of contention about who (or what) was in charge of the route, this was resolved too. My position as routemaster was restored and the app was relegated to a fun distraction for Ed to look at on the road.  It may come in useful someday.

After that, some dummy said, “Since we’re already out, let’s run over to the Sheyenne National Grassland and see what’s there.” So we did. But the dummy (me, of course) failed to comprehend that would add over an hour’s worth of driving to our day. Not good. 

 

However, the place was wonderful (sadly, there was no auto tour route but we walked along the road) and I saw Bobolink, Trumpeter Swan (2), Turkey, Least Flycatcher, and Yellow Warbler all over.   I was so excited I nearly wet myself!  I’ve been wanting to see a Bobolink all my birding life!

 Bobolink!

 

REVIEW: Fort Ransom State park 55.8/2=$26 plus day use   site 12

One of the nicest state parks I’ve ever camped in

The campsites were nicely spaced and there were only a few people there. But it had a huge playground; hills and trails all over the place; grassy trails mowed neatly and it almost appeared to be edged.  The North Country Trail goes through the park, so maybe that gives them additional incentive to keep it nice.

Our site was fine, but if we ever come back we should get site 22, which is by the Sheyenne River, or else get the site in the middle of the loop that overlooks a huge grassy field.

Gravel site surface with some sun; some shade. Starlink worked fine. 30-amp electricity.  There was a water fill at the entrance and one at the beginning of the camping loop by the dump station.  The pressure was decent and it didn’t take long to fill our tank. 

Ticks loved the place especially well. We all picked up a couple, but of course our dog Molly has her extremely expensive Bravecto Tick formula which kills them off her quickly. Us humans had to deal with them the old-fashioned way. 

Way off down away from the campground, there was a huge “offleash dog park”. Which was basically a 3 or 4 acre field with a mowed walkway all around it.  Molly didn’t venture into the field, although if she’d seen a rabbit you know she would have.  But she enjoyed trotting along the path all by herself, and she came back when called.

Note that the park webpage warned us to “follow DOT highway signs instead of online apps”.  The meaning of that is simple: when there’s a sign saying the park is “this way,” turn “this way.” And don’t argue with it. It’s that easy. However I will note that Google maps got us there just fine on paved roads, but our free trucker app did not. 

Magnus Goes North With Summer, Day 8

Tuesday June 3 

I went back early in the morning with Molly, the binoculars, and the camera.  And there, in almost the same spot as before, were the plovers!  They were fighting a little, but easy to get good pictures of.  This time I reported the other birds I saw and the walk so I could upload the checklist to ebirds as a “complete checklist” and include the picture, too.  It didn’t have  to be a complete checklist to include pictures, but I just wanted the additional verisimilitude.

 

And then it was on to Fort Ransom State Park in far eastern North Dakota. On the way out of the campground, a pheasant crossed the road in front of us. So I finally have my pheasant “life bird”. They’re common as mud out here, of course.

Fort Ransom is out in the middle of Nowhere, North Dakota. Google would have gotten us there easily, but the trucker app told Ed to keep going and so we ignored the road sign pointing to the park and went on past. Then the app kept telling him to turn on dirt roads, which was not necessary.  We managed a U-turn in an agricultural business of some sort. I hope it wasn’t private property, but we were in and out so fast I doubt if anyone would have cared.

 

 

It was a very nice state park, one of the nicest ones I’ve ever been in.  The campsites were nicely spaced and there were only a few people there at 4pm—the park staff and the campground host.  Later a couple of other campers arrived, but the place was still beautifully empty.

It was cool, 72 degrees, with a low of 48 expected. Starlink worked fine.

The park should be very highly rated. It had a huge playground. Hills and trails all over the place; grassy trails mowed neatly and it almost appeared to be edged.  The North Country Trail goes through the park, so maybe that gives them additional incentive to keep it nice.

 

 

Our site was fine, but if we ever come back we should get site 22, which is by the Sheyenne River, or else get the site in the middle of the loop that overlooks a huge grassy field.

30-amp electricity was all they had. There was a water fill at the entrance and at the beginning of the camping loop by the dump station.  The pressure was decent and we didn’t mind filling up.  Our site had a gravel surface with some sun; some shade.

Ticks loved the place especially well. We all picked up a couple, but of course Molly has her extremely expensive Bravecto Tick formula which kills them off her quickly. Us humans had to deal with them the old-fashioned way.

Way off down away from the campground, there was a huge “offleash dog park”. Which was basically a 3 or 4 acre field with a mowed walkway all around it.  Molly didn’t venture into the field, although if she’d seen a rabbit you know she would have.  But she enjoyed trotting along the path all by herself, and she came back when called.

Magnus Goes North With Summer, Day 7

Monday June 2

The wind ‘freshened’ in the night. I got up and was getting dressed and starting the coffee, when I felt the motorhome bounce. Aha, I thought—Ed’s getting up.  A few minutes later, when I was ready to leave, he’d still not appeared. But when I opened the door and nearly had it blow off its hinges, I knew the cause.

All day long, a strong wind was blowing out of the north with gusts up to 25 mph. Not pleasant. Since there was a chance of rain in the afternoon, I chose to go to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in the morning and then jog in the afternoon.  (Bad choice, by the way.)

But first we tried to drive to the campground on the shore of Lake Henry, which would have taken us down the narrow passage between Lake Thompson and Lake Henry that Laura wrote so eloquently about.  Water, tall grasses, and wild birds…she gives a little sigh and explains that it’s because she’s thinking how sad it is that how things leave when people come.

Ain’t that the truth. We couldn’t even drive to the campground from our direction, because we ended up in a row of lakeshore houses and a ‘private road’ sign.  You could access it from the other direction, but we didn’t have time or inclination to drive ten miles out of our way and come back.

No matter. The wild things were gone. But the beautiful water and grasses were still there, with a smattering of birds. We saw blue-winged teal, killdeer of course, goldfinches, and a lots of Yellow-Headed Blackbirds.

 

Not a new bird for me, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one.

On to De Smet. We went to the house in town first, and that was a good thing. There was a 1-1/2 hour tour that took you to the surveyor’s house, a recreation of the original De Smet school, a recreation of the Brewster school where Laura first taught, and the house that Pa built for him and Ma to live out their last years in. Laura had moved to Missouri by then, but Mary and Carrie lived there for a long time.

The surveyor's house

 

The schoolhouse foreground, the surveyor's house (white) background 

The Brewster School

Twist of hay for burning (lower left)

Laura's hand-drawn map of how close they came to walking away from town in a blizzard

Stairs to the attic in the surveyor's house

The tour guide was awesome. I need to note that on the website somehow. She told me a whole bunch of stuff I never knew and even more than that. Wow. There’s a whole lot of history there and we barely scratched the surface of it.

Stupid me had put in a pair of old contact lenses that—I think—were the loaner pair I was given when I got my prescription. They felt bad at first and went on feeling bad, and by the time Ed and I got to the starting place for the tour, the left one was was killing me.  I was able to swap it out with one that I’d been carrying around in my bag for several years. Nice to know that those contacts in the bag finally came in useful. 

Note: need to check that there’s an extra pair of right contact lenses in there, too.  I checked that there was a left lens.

The tour. Well, it was cool. Hard to describe what it’s like seeing things that you read about sixty years ago. When I started first grade, the teacher read from one of the books and we loved it much. So when I learned to read, it wasn’t long until I found them in the library and read them all. And read them again. And again. It was my happy place.

Reading the same books over and over didn’t seem to rot my brain, although my brother frequently told me it would.

Funny, though—when we first went to the surveyor’s house it seemed freaky to me that it was located in town, near first street by the railroad tracks.  But it was supposed to be by Silver Lake, which was at least a mile away! And that was a good instinct—it had been moved from its original location. I would have loved to have seen Silver Lake, but it had been drained and didn’t seem worth the trouble.  All the ducks and geese had gone somewhere else.

And that’s pretty much the whole story of how it felt to see De Smet and the buildings--it’s nothing like what it used to be.  There are trees all over now, but I know from history that when they lived there in 1880 or so there was only one tree that they called The Lone Cottonwood. It stood out on the prairie and made a landmark for travelers.

But now you have to find the right angle to look out over the prairie to get a view that doesn’t have trees in the distance.  And I know that the tallgrasses—the big bluestem and grama grass and indiangrass—are mostly gone from the horizon. I’m told they persist in diminished quantities in the edge rows of fields and along the railroad tracks.  A lot of the sloughs remain, but many more of the lakes are drained and converted to farmland. I bet it’s boggy and substandard.

(BTW, the map says that Silver Lake is a waterfowl production area now. Whatever that is.)

After that we drove out to the Ingalls Farm. They had a huge gift shop, but you could tell that it was managed for money money money, not history. We chose not the take the tour.

The prairie where the Ingalls Farm was:

At the end of the day Molly and I took a long walk down to the beach area beside the lake and the marshes just outside the park, when we’d walked with Ed earlier but saw nothing.  Although Merlin heard a pheasant. There were a few people fishing and some kids on bikes.

On the way back I noticed that along with the killdeer, there was a very pale colored bird on the beach.  I got it in the binocs and took a careful look at it.  Another one showed up, too, and the first one crouched down in the rocks and disappeared. But I got a really good look at them. It was clearly some sort of plover and only had one ring around the breast and looked totally different from a killdeer.  It was about 8:30 pm but not at all dark yet.

When I went back, I looked at the book and realized they were Piping Plover!!!  And an endangered species, at least in The United States, with only about 10000 of them  known to be present.

I reported it on ebird.  Very excited!

 

Magnus Goes North With Summer, Day 6

Sunday June 1

Very odd to admit this, but I woke up an hour before my alarm went off. The window shade was open and it was clearly daylight outside. I snoozed for a bit, but ended up getting up and getting outside by six-thirty. Molly got a long walk around the campground, then I had a cup of coffee, then she got a short walk up and down the road to another campground, and then I had a second cup of coffee. Ed didn’t get up until eight o’clock and that was because I went inside and made a tiny bit of noise sort of on purpose.  (We didn’t have a long drive, but we still needed to leave by 10:30 or 11)

Very unusual, I admit. Mainly it was my leg hurting that woke me up. I slept in the bed all night and it was pretty miserable. Maybe I’ll try the floor again tonight.  On the bed I’m comfortable only if I’m on my stomach, and on my stomach on that stupid foam pad it gets really hot and I wake up drenched in sweat. On the floor I’m only comfortable on my right side and it’s hard to sleep in the same position all night.  I really want my old bed back.  Maybe I’ll bring it up…maybe we can do halfsies with the foam pad…I dunno.

During the drive it was still very hazy from the Canadian wildfires. I was fascinated by all the little lakes and ponds we kept passing, some of which would have been sloughs back in the Little House era and some of which were still sloughs. Do they call them “prairie potholes” nowadays?  Were some of them old buffalo wallows?

 

 

 That's South Dakota, by the way 

 

 An episode from The Long Winter: Pa Goes to Volga

 

We had a fairly easy drive to Lake Thompson Recreation Area. It’s a huge lake and a lovely campground, and we got a nice long site by the water.  We had a little trouble at the gate—no body was working there, so I had to use the kiosk pay the state park entrance fees. It wasn’t difficult but very annoying, because I ended up having to buy an annual pass for both the jeep and motorhome. I’d been warned about this, but I was hoping I’d be able to get the jeep in for free.

Then we had to fill our water tank, but since I’d printed out a map and located the water fill stations ahead of time, that wasn’t too bad.  Always print a campsite map!  That saved us a lot of aggravation.

And so we arrived and the campground was mostly empty except for birds and ground squirrels.  We took a long walk along the lake and then around the campground. Very, very pleasant. And then it was suppertime.

In the time it took to go inside, prepare tacos, eat them and take a shower, the campground ceased to be a peaceful place. Hordes of campers with dozens of children each—or so it seemed from the noise—moved in on us. People were camped on either side of us and across the drive.  I even saw a loose dog, but I was hoping that was a short-term event.

No matter, once upon a time we were parents with small children. And this is a great place for camping with children—there’s a beach (swimming area), a playground, and lots of nice flat driveways for bicycling on.  I don’t mind their existence, just their noise. But that’s part of it. The only real issue with all this is how I’m going to get Molly a walk without mayhem ensuing. Maybe we’ll go along the lake. There’s  a lovely little walking path of short, mowed grass along this side of the lake. And at present, I don’t see any kids down there.

It was pretty warm weather; I was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants all day.  But the bugs were horrid—the wrens and peewees were hard at work but not making a dent in the bugginess.

Our lovely campsite before all the people moved in: 

 

Magnus Goes North With Summer, Day 5

Saturday May 31

It was very hazy the night before and then again on our drive. We learned that the fires in Canada were drifting down our way, covering all the north central states with a dusty overcast.

Northern Missouri was kind of flat with a few hills and lots of big fields of corn.  So many McNuggets—do we really want all that corn in our diets?

 

It seemed to be taking forever to get to Iowa. The drive to Ponca State Park had been planned to be fairly long--four hours or so according to google--but I didn’t go back and check the actuals. Ed was trying out a free trucker navigation app on his phone so he was kept well entertained and didn’t get impatient. Not that he usually does, but it is a little tedious for him to drive on and on with little feedback that he was getting somewhere. Having the app open (hands-free, of course) made that easier.

 

The only problem with the app (or so we thought) is that it doesn’t repeat itself. So if you get on a road and are supposed to turn off in 17 miles, it will tell you—at the beginning—to turn on Highway XYZ in 17 miles. But when you actually get to the highway, it stays silent. Not helpful—after 17 miles, we’ve already forgotten!

But eventually we ended up at Ponca State Park, in Nebraska on the border with the Missouri River and Iowa on the other side.  Lovely place. Even Ed said we’d want to come back for a multiple day stay here sometime.

I may not bother writing a review, but if I did I’d gripe long and loud about the vehicle day use fee.  On top of our camping fee, we had to pay $14 per vehicle just to enter the park.  For one night!!!!  Not sensible, Nebraska.

But aside from that, we’re talking serious hills all covered with big trees, a great Missouri river overlook—

Trails all over the place although I’ll probably not get to travel any this time; a swimming pool; playgrounds; and probably other cool stuff.  Plus lots of birds and the insect population that feeds them.

The roads are like rollercoasters and kids ride bikes all over them. But still people seem to speed excessively—faster than I’ve ever consistently seen people drive in a state park. Molly and I walked way down the road past another camping loop and down to some sort of prairie wildflower restoration project. It was pretty but I didn’t care to walk through the brush—I’d already picked up enough ticks just walking around camp—so I couldn’t appreciate it. And we didn’t have a lot of time.

Next day we walked up the road that went just past our camp site and discovered another whole camping area.  It was either primitive or electric only, but there were a handful of people camping there. Looked nice.

House wren, Eastern Towhee, Spotted Towhee, Yellow Warbler, Wood Thrush, White-breasted Nuthatch, Warbling Vireo (I finally got to see one singing! I think I’ll know this from now on. It has a very distinctive exclamation point at the end—Weebly_warbly_woodle_widdle_wee_wwbly-WHIT!)

Magnus Goes North With Summer, Day 4

Friday May 30

As planned, we went to the Pony Express Museum. Finding it, in a downtown full of little tiny streets and one-ways was somewhat challenging.  We ended up having to pull over, look at the map, think, then use our eyes. Google Maps was about a block off on the location.

 

The museum was okay. The little movie they showed was more concerned with the founders and owners of the company that ended up running the Pony Express, and there was little of interest about the places and routes and riders. Also the movie had an annoying, sucky background soundtrack.  But the museum exhibits covered all the other stuff in detail.

 

But the most interesting thing was that the building had been repurposed at least twice since the Pony Express days, so when it became a museum they’d done an excavation to expose part of the original foundation. And they exhibited the artifacts they found there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After that we went to the restaurant I’d chosen, 54^th Street Scratch Grill and Bar. I thought they were only a chain in the St Joseph area, but it turns out they’re a nationwide chain with locations in Dallas and maybe even McKinney.  Oh, well, that’s how it goes. The service was fast and the food was very good.

Home by 6:45 or so, in plenty of time for Molly’s evening walk and winding down. On the road again tomorrow!

 

Campground sucked, pretty much.  Here are some shots of it. Nice trees and that's about all.