A group of dedicated North Dakotans has put together a proposal that will bring significant recognition to the North Dakota Bad Lands. They are my heroes.

The project is the creation of a new national monument, the Maah Daah Hey National Monument. If the project succeeds, it will be an immense source of pride for all North Dakotans.

A little background.

The U.S. Forest Service manages about 4 million acres of National Grasslands, mostly in the Great Plains. North Dakota has about a million of those acres, more than any other state. They are known variously as the Little Missouri National Grassland and the Dakota Prairie Grasslands.

The million acres here, much of it in the North Dakota Bad Lands, are managed by the U.S. Forest Service for multiple uses, including ranching/grazing, mineral development and recreation. Recreation (hiking, canoeing, birding, horseback riding, hunting, photography, camping, etc.) generally takes a back seat to the other two.

But when the current management plan for the Grasslands was written more than 20 years ago, it set aside about 15 per cent as “Inventoried Roadless” areas. There are 11 parcels, totaling about 140,000 acres, in a corridor about 75 miles long from north to south through the Bad Lands. These are areas where few modern roads have been built and little or no development has taken place.

If the efforts of this North Dakota group are successful, those 11 areas, those 140,000 acres, will be part of a new national monument. Right here in North Dakota. In our Bad Lands.

YAY!

Most of those acres have been leased for grazing to local ranchers, and the ranchers can drive in there to check cattle, but that’s about it. There’s virtually no oil, gas, coal or gravel activity inside the boundaries of each area. I think there may be some mineral leasing from days past, but if an oil companies now wants to recover the oil, for example, they’d have to drill in from outside using standard horizontal drilling practices. No surface occupancy on these acres.

To be sure, there’s lots of mineral development around the edges. If you look at the map I’m putting with this article, you’ll see all those little purple dots. There are A LOT! Hundreds of them, with a tiny few inside the parcels, I’m guessing that were there from the earlier oil boom before the plan was written to make the areas roadless.

There are still some primitive roads, mostly two-track trails, inside the parcels, that were also there before the new plan, but they are only used by the ranchers now. Since the ranchers are running cattle, most of these areas are fenced off from outside intrusion and to keep the cattle in. I can tell you that quite a few hunters, including me, have parked outside those fences and walked in, in search of game.

I do remember, back in the 1970s and ’80s, there was a rugged, rutted two-track up the east side of Bullion Butte, and I drove up it a few times. The view from up there, the place I call the “Mothership of the Bad Lands,” is spectacular. You can see all the way to Montana, and maybe even South Dakota and Saskatchewan. Well …

Then Bill Clinton’s team wrote the plan to close it, and at first, I was kind of pissed that I couldn’t do that anymore, but then I discovered the joy of hiking it …

But now, more than 20 years later, comes one the best ideas out of western North Dakota ever: making Bullion Butte part of a new National Monument: the Maah Daah Hey National Monument.

Bullion Butte, which Lillian Crook, the founder of the Badlands Conservation Alliance and the woman I love and am married to, has written about at length, joins 10 other very special areas of the Bad Lands, places I’ve written about before, like the Kendley Plateau, the Long X Divide, and Twin Buttes.

Now, you’ve heard the name Maah Daah Hey before. It’s the incredible hiking, horseback riding and biking trail that runs through the entire Bad Lands from north to south, and since it passes through half the proposed new monument areas, and alongside the rest, It just made sense to give its name to the new idea.

The name Maah Daah Hey is derived from the Native American Mandan language meaning “grandfather” or “long lasting,” and is used to describe an area that has been around for a long time and deserving of respect.

Deserving of respect. That’s what this group of conservation-minded North Dakotans thought when they wrote this proposal, which will be submitted to President Joe Biden in the next few weeks.

Who are these guys?

Well, they’re the staff and board members of the Badlands Conservation Alliance, the Dakota Resource Council, the North Dakota Wildlife Federation and the North Dakota Chapter of the Sierra Club, working with the Tribal Council of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.

Nora Swenson, the tech guru for the Badlands Conservation Alliance, has put together a website for the proposal. You can look at it here. And you can read the whole proposal, including a good description of each of the 11 areas being considered.

There’s a big announcement being made today, at 11 a.m., at the North Dakota Heritage Center. Come and join us, and bring your friends who love the Bad Lands. This is a big deal. The sponsoring organizations will be there.

After the announcement, the real work begins, convincing the folks in Washington that this is a good idea. And we don’t have much time. It needs to be done while President Biden is still in office.

The process for creating a national monument is not really complicated. Unlike national parks, which require congressional action, national monuments only require the signature of the president of the United States. Thanks to our nation’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was looking for a way to begin setting aside land, especially in the western half of the country, where he had lived and visited and which he loved.

The Antiquities Act of 1906, signed into law by TR himself, authorized the president to create national monuments. Roosevelt did just that, starting with Devils Tower and the Grand Canyon. Before leaving office two years later, he did 16 more. Now there are 159 of them, managed by, variously, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Some that you might be familiar with include the Statue of Liberty, Agate Fossil Beds, Dinosaur National Monument, George Washington Birthplace, Muir Woods, Scottsbluff, Sagamore Hill, the Oregon Trail and the Upper Missouri River Breaks in Montana, the famous “White Cliffs” area. I’ve canoed it many times.

It’s a pretty impressive list. You can look at it here. 159 of them. If everything works right, by January 20, 2025, there will be 160.