Travels With Charlie-Somewhere in North Dakota

[Bruce Day]

I've lived in and flown jets out of Grand Forks, Minot in NoDak and Rapid City in SoDakota. Got a Master's degree from U of North Dakota. We used to fly low and fast across these hills in B-52's so I've seen a lot of this country.
My great grandfather homesteaded near Dickinson, ND.


These photos are from the Little Missouri Badlands area of NoDak south of Medora, about 30 miles east of the Montana line. Its Teddy Roosevelt and cowboy country. Its a patchwork of private and public lands. Great to hunt and full of game but a person has to like to walk and accept that he may not limit out. We must have seen 50- 70 sharptails, and further east , maybe a thousand pheasants but up here, I like the native sharptails.....to me they are a treasure because we can hunt pheasant anywhere and I have so many opportunities to hunt wild pheasant that it becomes common. But sharptail grouse are always special. I'll post more photos later. If a person really wants to go and can stand the terrain and distance let me know.

Charlie and Larry wanted to see the big animal range so we drove down through the buffalo, antelope and elk range where we saw hundreds of animals....I'll post photos in a couple days. Saw plenty of golden eagles, prairie falcons, etc.

Somebody asked if that was a dog on point off on the far hillside. Yes, but not on point. Sharps won't hold after the first couple weeks and so the dog was just searching. If we got a far flush, we might have to walk a half mile but we could raise the bird again.

You don't measure the available hunting land in acres here, but we had over a hundred square miles of land to hunt, so maybe thats 100 x 640 acres, 64,000 acres. We ran 5 dogs, four setters, one Brit. I left my old pointer Shortstop at home for this because he could not have lasted. In a few weeks I'll take him to South Dakota where he can manage better.

Both Dakotas and Nebraska have lots of very hill terrain. South Dakota has real mountains. Nebraska has areas that look just like Colorado with pine covered ridges, steep cliffs and clear lakes.