BCA lost a valuable member this past fall. He won’t be easy to replace. There’ll be a noticeable gap in the hiking line on our outings next summer. There’ll be one less pair of strong arms to carry wood to the campsite. There’ll be a little less humor in the conversations around the campfire. And there’s already a big hole in the hearts of the family and friends who loved Larry Dopson.

All of us in BCA send our deepest sympathy to Larry’s wife, Christine Hogan, a member of our board of directors. Some of them sat with her, one on each side of Larry’s hospital bed, as he lay on a ventilator in the intensive care unit of Sanford Hospital in Bismarck for seven long weeks. We read to him, and talked to him, not knowing if he could hear us or comprehend what we were saying, through the fog of the drug cocktail his caregivers had designed for him to try to rescue him from the deadly coronavirus that was ravaging his body (despite the fact that he was fully vaccinated and boosted).

We talked about the Badlands.

Remember, Larry, that time we all agreed to help reconstruct the trail markers in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and after digging the first hole, we discovered that the only two strong enough to lift those heavy posts and plant them deep enough in the ground to keep the bison from knocking them over were you and your son Christopher?

Christine Hogan and Larry Dopson pause for a break in a familiar setting—on a Badlands trail. We’ll miss Larry on those trails this summer.

Remember, Larry, that time when you and Christine and Lillian and Jim miscalculated how much water it would take to get from Point A to Point B on an early September hundred-degree day on a Badlands trail, and after you planted us in the shade of the only tree within miles, you stumbled down the trail right into an unlocked oil shack with water bottles sitting on the shelf? Remember how appreciative those women were when you delivered water so they could finish the hike, and remember how cold that beer was in the cooler when you finally got to the car? Remember how wonderful it felt to just sit in the Little Missouri River and soak our bodies?

Remember, Larry, the day on the Little Missouri River when your kayak slipped over the top of a single wire fence across the river, but Christine’s didn’t, and her friends had to pull her sputtering out of the water when the wire darned near decapitated her and sent the contents of her kayak floating down the river? Remember how good the food tasted at the end of the day at a campsite on public lands?

Remember the Badlands night beside a fire on the bank of the Little Missouri at Teddy Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch, a million stars in the sky and coyotes howling to a full moon across the river?

Remember, Larry, the day Mike Jacobs tipped his own canoe and dropped most of that night’s supper into the Little Missouri River, and you caught eight potatoes, one at a time, as they came floating by?

Oh, and remember a day in Montana, Larry, when you came so close to falling 100 feet from Citadel Rock into the BIG Missouri River that you caught a glimpse of the Seven-Headed Vishnu?

Yeah, Larry Dopson loved his time in the out-of-doors, especially the Badlands. He was looking forward to more Badlands trips when he retired last summer, his best summer in years after a kidney transplant gave him a new lease on life after years of not being able to be very far away from the dialysis machine that kept him alive.

Christine Hogan and Larry Dopson pause for a break in a familiar setting — on a Badlands trail. Photo by Jim Fuglie.

It was so unfair, this big, strong, physically fit, intellectually-gifted barrister, with everything to live for and much to give, struck down with Covid-19 because his immune system was compromised by the very anti-rejection drugs that protected that transplanted kidney that had saved his life just a year earlier and despite being fully vaccinated.

We’ll talk about him and toast him next summer, beside a Badlands campfire, his wife Christine and son Chris and daughter-in-law Eve, and those two wonderful grandchildren with a whole lifetime of Badlands excursions ahead of them, and all those BCA friends who’ve shared wild times and times in the wild with him over the years.

BCA won’t soon forget Larry Dopson. There’s one less “Voice for Wild North Dakota Places” now, but BCA’s work will go on, in Larry’s memory. In fact, when Christine designated BCA as a place to send memorials to Larry, a whole bunch of his friends and associates, with no other BCA ties, did just that, providing a nice financial shot in the arm to BCA.

So join us this summer around a riverbank campfire, or atop Bullion Butte, or down the Boicourt Trail, the places where our strategies for protecting this important wild North Dakota place are hatched, discussed, and put into action. Where we renew our spirits away from the cares of life. Where we breathe deep and are restored. Larry will be with us in spirit.

Remembering Larry Dopson