Why It's Time to Visit North Dakota
The Peace Garden State is the under-the-radar travel destination you've been looking for.
Courtesy of Bruce Wendt/North Dakota Tourism
How much do you know about North Dakota?
It’s more than wheat fields and windmills as far as the eye can see — though there’s value in a few quiet days under the deep blue skies of one of the country’s most serene landscapes.
Anyone who’s driven through the prairie state recently can testify to the proliferation of wildlife, dozens of historical and cultural landmarks and upwelling of breweries, restaurants and farmers’ markets that make it a road trip-worthy destination today.
Courtesy of North Dakota Tourism
If you’re heading from the east, via I-95, your first stop over the Minnesota border will be Fargo — a city that’s so much more than the iconic 1996 movie that, as locals point out, wasn’t even filmed in the area. (The movie’s woodchipper is on permanent display in the visitor’s center, though.)
North Dakota’s most populous city is also its cultural and culinary capital. Fargo is home to the 1926 art deco Fargo Theatre, which shows nightly movies and hosts the Fargo Film Festival each spring, as well as the Fargo-Moorhead Opera, the only opera company between Minneapolis and Billings.
Courtesy of North Dakota Tourism
You’ll want to start your night with a craft beer — maybe a Buffalo Rodeo rye pilsner, or a Wheez the Juice IPA — at Drekker Brewing Company, and end it with a cold Grain Belt Premium at The Bismarck, a quintessential Great Plains dive since the 1940s.
In between, make the most of the growing food scene with a restaurant crawl.
You can try knoephla, a rich, creamy, German-by-way-of-North Dakota version of chicken and dumplings, along with a range of local and regional beers, at Wurst Bier Hall, next door to Drekker. Then, continue to Blackbird Woodfire for pizzas made with North Dakota flour and seasonal toppings. Or stop for an appetizer at the stylish Hotel Donaldson, a refurbished 1893 boarding house that now contains seventeen rooms inspired by local artists and the upscale HoDo Restaurant.
South Dakota's Must-See Attractions
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North Dakota’s tallest building — the North Dakota State Capitol Building, a twenty-one-story skyscraper on the Plains — is in Bismarck, three hours to the west.
If you’re in the state capital on a Saturday morning, head to the BisMarket, in shady Kiwanis Park, for live music and a fresh breakfast. For lunch, try the Little Cottage Café — a 1950s diner that serves best-in-town renditions of rib-sticking North Dakota favorites such as buttery knoephla, deep-fried beef fleischkuechle and custardy kuchen. (As soon as you sit down, ask about the caramel rolls. If they aren’t sold out, you’ll want one of those, too.) You can walk it off on the Missouri Valley Millennium Legacy Trail, which runs along miles of Missouri riverbank.
Jed Portman
Follow the river north to Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, where you can still see the divots left in the earth by Hidatsa earth lodges and travois poles. If you have time, visit a few of the less curated Mandan sites in the area, too, including the Double Ditch Indian Village State Historic Site and the Fort Clark State Historic Site, marking the former Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch — once a bustling trading post on the edge of the Missouri River, now a pitted field overlooking a valley left dry when the volatile Big Muddy changed its course.
Lewis and Clark wintered in this area from 1804 to 1805, and their Fort Mandan — likely buried beneath the present-day bends of the Missouri River — has been reconstructed in Washburn.
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On the other side of the state, just before you reach Montana, you’ll arrive at the tourist town of Medora. Medora entered the history books when Theodore Roosevelt, grieving the loss of his mother and his young wife, came west in the 1880s to work his sorrows away on the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn ranches — now part of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a prairie fantasyland of bison, elk, pronghorn, wild horses and epic, colorful Badlands topography.
Theodore Roosevelt doesn’t get crowded like Glacier, Yellowstone or even Badlands National Park in South Dakota. That means that, especially if you get on the South Unit’s Scenic Loop Drive early in the morning, chances are good you’ll be the only car watching a herd of bison amble across the asphalt just feet away — even in the peak months of June, July and August. (You can also expect encounters with prairie dogs by the hundreds, if not thousands.)
Courtesy of Anzley Harmon/North Dakota Tourism
Medora itself is worth a visit, too, after pitching a tent in the park for later. Embrace the kitsch at the nightly Pitchfork Steak Fondue, where you can chow down on a slab of beef deep-fried on a pitchfork and a few cowboy sides — baked beans, baked potatoes, thick-cut toast — while watching the sun descend over the Badlands. Then, walk next door to the Burning Hills Amphitheater for the flag-waving, foot-stomping Medora Musical, a summertime tradition since 1965. You’ll leave feeling proud to be sleeping under the stars in North Dakota.
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