The first turtle stands a quarter mile from the Burning Coal Vein trailhead: a cedar post, chest-high, branded with the flat geometric turtle that will run your life for the next three days. The badlands repeat themselves — the same scoria knobs, the same gray clay domes, the same juniper draws opening onto the same impossible pastel bands — and a GPS out here mostly confirms that you are lost somewhere specific. So you ride turtle to turtle instead, a hundred and forty-four miles of them strung north like a rosary, and somewhere around the fortieth bead you stop checking the map at all.

The Maah Daah Hey runs the spine of the North Dakota badlands from Burning Coal Vein in the south to the CCC Campground below the Long X divide in the north, stitched together in the nineties by Forest Service crews and stubborn locals. The name comes from the Mandan and is usually translated as "grandfather," or "an area that will be around a long time." Both readings hold. This is the longest continuous singletrack in the country, and across three days of July riding we saw nine other humans — six of them at a single trailhead reunion — and not one of them moving on the trail itself.

Gumbo is not a figure of speech

The badlands are built partly of bentonite, a volcanic clay that drinks several times its weight in water and turns, when wet, into something between peanut butter and setting concrete. Locals call it gumbo, and they say it with the flat tone of people describing a relative in prison. Forty minutes of thunderstorm on our first evening, in the broken country south of Wannagan, and the trail went from dusty hardpack to a substance that packed both frames solid inside fifty yards — wheels seized, drivetrains entombed, an extra thirty pounds of Cretaceous mud apiece.

There is no riding through gumbo, and there is no walking beside it either, because the crust breaks under boots the same way it breaks under tires. What there is, is waiting. We propped the bikes on a scoria outcrop, ate the day's second lunch, and watched the sun bake the surface back to a rideable shell in under an hour — a resurrection that would read as miraculous anywhere with humidity. The badlands take away, and then, because nothing out here holds a grudge, they hand it right back. Gumbo doesn't want to kill you. It wants you to stand still and think about what you did.

Gumbo doesn't want to kill you. It wants you to stand still and think about what you did.

Devils Pass and the arithmetic of water

Day two is the postcard. The trail crosses Devils Pass on a neck of ground maybe twenty feet wide, hundred-foot drops shrugging off either side, then spends the afternoon rolling through petrified-log country toward the Little Missouri. It is also the day the math starts. In July the badlands hold their heat like a cast-iron pan — our computers read 96 by noon — and there is no reliable water on trail. You cache gallons at the gravel-road crossings the day you drive in, or you carry stupidly, and we did both, which is the correct answer.

The ford at the Little Missouri, near the Elkhorn Ranch unit, arrives like a rumor you finally get to confirm: a line of plains cottonwoods lying across the heat shimmer, then knee-deep water the color of milked coffee moving over a firm gravel bar. We stood in it for twenty minutes with the bikes on our shoulders and our hats floating beside us. A golden eagle worked the bluff on the far bank the whole time, entirely uninterested in our opinion of the place.

The detour that isn't

Back on day one, the trail had already pulled its best trick. Bikes are banned inside Theodore Roosevelt National Park, so where the Maah Daah Hey threads the park's South Unit, the Forest Service built the Buffalo Gap Trail as a mandatory bypass — and the joke is that the detour is better riding than most states manage on purpose. Twenty-odd miles of benched tread swinging through grass draws and juniper shade, fast and flowing where the main trail is stern. We rolled off the far end evangelized. It felt vaguely illegal to enjoy a reroute that much.

Day three is where the trail collects. The country north of Magpie goes big and bare, the Ice Caves spur exhales its strange refrigerated air into the afternoon, and the gates keep coming — wire-and-post cattle gates, each one a dismount, a wrestle, a remount. We stopped counting at thirty. Cooked, and rationing the last cached gallon, we started treating them as interval training designed by a rancher with a grievance.

Notes for whoever's next

  • Go in June or September if you can. July worked, but July also read 96 in the shade, and there is no shade.
  • Nothing under 2.2-inch tires. The scoria eats casings, and the gumbo, even half-dry, wants all the volume you own.
  • Cache water at the road crossings the day you drive in — a gallon per rider per crossing — and treat campground wells as a bonus, not a plan.
  • Watch the radar like it owes you money. A two-hour storm is a five-hour sentence once the clay gets involved.
  • Outfitters in Medora and Watford City run shuttles. Book before you drive out, not after.

The last turtle stands a few hundred yards short of the CCC Campground — same cedar, same brand, one shoulder of the post splintered where weather or cattle or enthusiasm took a bite. There's a register at the trailhead in a steel box. The entry above ours, two weeks old, read in full: "Day 3. Out of water. Followed the turtles. They knew." We signed beneath it and sat in the dirt by the bikes for a while, not talking, eleven hours of daylight still on the clock in a place that had never once asked us to like it. Grandfather, the name says. Three days is about long enough to understand the translation.