Wapiti &c.

“You are now in a bear habitat,” a number of signs posted at Wapiti campground, a couple of miles from Jasper Townsite, said in English and below that in French. Also included were stern bilingual warnings about staying clear of bears, not feeding bears, etc., with the unwritten message being, don’t be a moron who mistakes real bears for Yogi and Boo-Boo.

We didn’t see any bears at Wapiti, though there were plenty of elk, which could also clean your clock if you acted threatening or weird in their vicinity. Elk or no elk, Wapiti quickly became my favorite campsite anywhere, edging out other favorites such as the walk-in site at Pete’s Lake in Michigan with its view of starlight on the lake or Bastrop State Park, which evokes a little high school nostalgia for me.

Wapiti’s an enormous wooded campground, 366 sites spread on a large piece of real estate between the road to Jasper Townsite and the Athabasca River. It’s also bounded on one side by a creek, which I later found out was called Whister’s Creek, and we got a site next to the creek that included plenty of tall trees and a flat spot among them just big enough for the tent.

We parked some folding chairs creekside, which made a fine place to read. It was rapid and rocky, meaning great sport for Lilly and Ann in stone tossing. Even better than any of that was the constant low rush of the water, recorded versions of which people pay money for. By itself it was soothing to fall asleep to, but it also had the bonus of drowning out noise from our neighbors on either side, who weren’t that near anyway. No distant caterwauling or radio noise from people who just have to have their Retro-80s! Superstation! Flashback! Weekend! playing in the middle of a national park.

The campsite at the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt NP was shady and quiet, too, because there weren’t many people there. People go to South Dakota. People go to Yellowstone, Glacier and the Grand Tetons. North Dakota? I asked a park ranger about the low number of visitors, and she said yep, TR NP’s an unknown jewel of the park system. I agree.

A thunderstorm greeted us on our arrival in that part of North Dakota. We’d started the day, July 12, in a motel in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and didn’t particularly make haste on the drive that took us back across part of Saskatchewan and into North Dakota. By the time we stopped for gas in Williston, ND, it was almost dark and we could see an angry-looking storm off to the east. Just the thing you want to see when you’re planning to pitch a tent not far away, to the southeast.

But we pressed on, and the darker it got, the more terrific the lightning became. The country around there isn’t completely flat, but it’s flat enough to let you see for miles—boiling dark clouds lit up by bolts. Best lightning show I’d seen in years. The girls were so scared they covered themselves up with a blanket. So scared they actually shared the blanket without argument.

Sleeping in the car wasn’t something I really wanted to do, since I have long legs, and as soon as we got to the campsite, I put up the tent as fast as I could. It rained a little but mostly I had lightning and thunder to content with. There were trees around, and the time between the flash and the rumble was fairly long, so I figured I was fairly safe. We piled into the tent and listened to more thunder and watched everything light up with spooky blue lightning light for a while. When we woke up the next morning, the sky was clear and the ground wasn’t wet.

After our very first day of driving, the long Schaumburg to Fargo run on July 1, we arrived at Lindenwood Park, which is along the west bank of the Red River of the North just across from Moorhead, Minn. It’s a Fargo municipal park, and yet has campsites, a couple of rows for RVs near the river, and space for tents right on the river. I’d called ahead a couple of weeks before but was told that the tent sites had flooded. “It’s been raining a lot here,” the attendant said.

So I wasn’t sure we’d be able to camp there, but the river was down by the time we got there, so we got a site for a reasonable $12.50 a night next to the river. It didn’t have a picnic table, so we took (and cooked) our meals on the ground. Not many rocks were at hand to throw in the river, so the kids pried loose pieces of earth from a nearby spot that had been flooded, then dried and cracked, and used those. We had some mosquitoes, but not as many as I would have thought.

Our neighbor was a minor pest, though. A wiry, grizzled fellow in his 50s who was bicycling long distance, he was eager to make conversation, beginning while I was putting up the tent, including almost immediately oblique comments on my skills at it. “So this is the first time you’ve put up the tent, huh?” I might have answered him as a younger man, but I didn’t bother, especially since I was busy actually putting up the tent at the time. (The answer: I’d put it up in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana, all successfully enough to shield my family from rain and wind and bugs.)

Later conversations with the man, which luckily weren’t that extensive, made me think he was just one of those people who had a knack for saying mildly irritating things, probably without realizing it, so I won’t be too hard on him. Still, like the Red River mosquitoes, I wasn’t sad to leave him behind.