How to do the great American road trip: Minnesota to Montana

The bison looked us squarely in the eyes, as if to weigh up the value of a full-on assault or just a passing interest. Only a teenager in bison years, his curiosity seemed satisfied by his show of bravado and he wandered on with the herd, grazing into the distance.

Read part one of Diaries from the Road here

We had stopped in the heart of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, our first look at the Badlands of North Dakota, a unique geological feature forged by the haphazard erosion of rivers and streams over half a million years. The soft sandstone has been dramatically re-shaped into a landscape of startling colour and formations, with buttes, pillars, ravines and ridges strewn into a chaotic jumble of improbable shapes for miles in every direction.

Amid this fantastically sculpted vista, the several hundred-strong herd of bison roam the valley floor, the crown jewel in a wildlife portfolio of little and large proportions, from coyotes and the eternally comical prairie dogs to bighorn sheep, pronghorn, mule deer, white-tail deer and feral horses.

The bison rule the roost, of course. Weighing up to 2,000lbs and standing six feet at the shoulder, they are hard to deny. Which left us holding our breath – and our normally barkative labrador holding her tongue – when our car was surrounded by the herd hoovering its way alongside the Little Missouri River.

We had arrived by way of Fargo and Bismarck, leaving Minnesota in an arrow-straight drive due west along motorway I-94 that had our trusty Winnebago RV purring through the 415 miles. We have dubbed her ‘Indefatigable,’ or Fati for short, for the way she presses on relentlessly, her Ford V10 engine making light of the 11-ton load across the 3,000-mile stretch of the US we have crossed in barely two months.

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Towing our little Ford Fiesta, Nippy, we have the perfect combination of long-distance home and short-distance scurryer, using the car to explore once we pitch camp.

That mix saw us stay at the delightful Diamond Rose Ranch family farm in Park Rapids, Minnesota, and visit Lake Itasca and the headwaters of the Mississippi, then drive to Bemidji, home of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, two literal larger-than-life figures from American folklore.