Getting Your Arms Around 381 Years of History
The following is a hiking report by Badlands Conservation Alliance members Pat and Roger Ashley, detailing their journey to the oldest cottonwood tree in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We're grateful to Pat and Roger for their contribution. BCA leads outdoor outings and hosts camping experiences in western North Dakota throughout the year. Join us at an upcoming outing.
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Getting Your Arms Around 381 Years of History
By Pat and Roger Ashley
We’ve lived in northeastern Montana and western North Dakota for most of the last 42 years, and we’ve visited the Badlands hundreds of times. Whenever we return we learn something new about the seemingly forbidding area. We’ve also witnessed the mushrooming of the oil and gas industry in the region along with hundreds of spills. We joined Badlands Conservation Alliance as a way to have a more impactful voice on the treatment of this land. With BCA’s guidance we’ve written letters to the North Dakota Industrial Commission commenting on the oil and gas development.
In September 2022, we hiked with BCA to the Twin Buttes area. This is a beautiful part of the Badlands that deserves more protection.
In early June of this year, we participated in a BCA-led hike to the oldest known plains cottonwood tree in Theodore Roosevelt National Park—maybe in the entire northern plains. Unlike Roosevelt’s famed point-to-point hikes, our group hiked around obstacles rather than going through or over them. We started this expedition with a group of about 20 people and narrowed down to five when we came across a backwater channel filled with this spring’s floodwater. The channel was expected to be dry this time of the year. Four of us scrambled up the hill adjacent to the channel and others turned around trying to find another way. The four that scrambled up the hill found a narrow place to cross. An easier way across the channel could not be found, so Lillian Crook came back to the channel and crossed through two feet of stagnant water and mud. She joined the two of us along with Carl Sorensen and Clay Jenkinson.
This was quite the expedition as much of the hike was bushwhacking through thickets of Rocky Mountain junipers, chokecherry, buffalo berry, and serviceberry on slopes above the Little Missouri floodplain. In some places we climbed over or crawled under fallen trees, and gingerly navigated near sinkholes while avoiding prickly pear cactus. Finally, on the floodplain of the river, we wandered through sagebrush, broom snakeweed, and rubber rabbitbrush to what was once the edge of the Little Missouri River. The meandering line of cottonwoods denoted the edge of the old channel now abandoned by the river. But which cottonwood tree is the oldest? The only information we had was the approximate location and the diameter of the tree. It was discovered in a research survey of the floodplain 13 years ago so we weren’t even sure if it was still alive. Clay and Lillian found a cottonwood that seemed to match the description, and we did what all good folks do who appreciate a big tree: we put our arms around it to see if the circumference was correct. Some people would call this hugging the tree, thus the label “tree hugger.” I would like to think that we were trying to get our arms around 381 years of history. The tree has provided valuable historical information on climate and growing season precipitation in the Northern Plains.
The tree emphasizes the importance of preserving as much of the Badlands as we can. Even though the land where the tree is located has had federal protection for only 88 years of the tree’s life, rapid oil development since the mid-2000s has greatly impacted the area just outside the boundaries of the park and grasslands. The fairly unaltered drainage upstream of the park compared to the rest of the Great Plains make the North Dakota Badlands unique. We don’t really know what we have—or what we have lost—until we look and listen. This is one reason why we are members of BCA.