Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Medora, ND: Painted Canyon Overlook

What would you do if I told you the best-kept secret in the National Parks Service was in the southwest corner of North Dakota?

Theodore Roosevelt National Park is 100% worth the effort to go all the way to North Dakota. The scenery in these photos is from the Painted Canyon Overlook at the Visitor's Center, heading west on I-94 before getting to Medora.

TRNP is in the badlands. The experience of seeing them for the first time was really fun; the whole rest of the state looks nothing like this. All of a sudden they just appear out of the ground. The photos don't really do any justice to the landscape. I could have just stared at the land for hours.

There are hiking trails leading out from this visitor's center, but we didn't take any. (The guidebooks made them seem rather steep, but we didn't check them out to see if this was true). We just enjoyed looking out from the overlook.

There is lots more to come from TRNP, and I'll try to break it down so I don't overload you with a million photos in one post. It was beautiful and we saw a lot of cool things! This was National Park #1 (of 5!) on our trip last summer. We weren't sure what to expect in North Dakota, and I was very pleasantly surprised by everything we saw. (The guidebooks actually led me to find even more things I was interested in that we didn't go see in the interest of time.) Also, we had 4G internet access on our phones for the entire time we were in North Dakota, including while we were in the park, and that was pretty great!