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continually resculpted by heavy rain and strong wind-start to multiply, until al l the land looks like "bad" land. Looking out into the great expa nse it's ha rd to believe there's anything in there, much less hootin' and hollerin' mountain bikers. And even on Labor Day weekend, there weren't many of those. " IT WAS L IKE ON ANOTHER P~ANET, THE ONLY HUMAN AMONGST RID I NG PETRIFIED TREES, LIZARDS, RATTLESNAKES, COWS AND WILD H 0 R S E S. Generally, where good mountain biking's to be had, legions of sinewy, weather-beaten mountain boys and girls cannot be fa r behind. Not so in Medoral This is either a shame or a pleasure, depending on your outlook. I felt like I was a Maah Daah Hey pioneer. There was absolutely no one out there, which made the whole experience pretty damn surreal. It was like riding on another planet, the only human amongst petrified trees, lizards, rattlesnakes, cows and wild horses. Medora's the kind of town that makes you proud to be an American. Every day at dusk in the town square, three cowboys on horseback lower and fo ld the flag. Most of the vis itors I spoke to were North Dakota natives who'd come to enjoy the Medora Musical and eat the Pitchfork Fondue. In fact, the town wasn't established by an American, but by the French aristocrat, the Marquis de Mores, who named it after his wife, Medora von Hoffman, the daughter of a wea lthy New York banker. Clearly a yankee wannabe, the marquis chose Medora in 1883 to be the location for his meatpacking plant where he planned to raise, slaughter and package beef to sell to cities in the East, in what he termed, "One of the most gigantic enterprises ever conceived." Unfortunately, by 1887 the business had gone bust and the marquis left the US to hunt tigers in India. Of North Dakota's Badlands, Teddy Roosevelt, who first visited the region in 1883 to bag a buffa lo, once said, "There are few sensations I prefer to that of galloping over these rolling limitless prairies, with rifle in hand, or winding my way among the barren, fantastic and grimly picturesque deserts of the so-called Bad Lands." returned to New York City to pursue his political career. Teddy said, on many occasions, that if it weren't for his time in the Badlands, he never would have become President of the United States. "The preservation of the scenery, of the forests, of the wilderness life and the wilderness game for the people as a whole," became one of Roosevelt's top priorities. One thing that hasn't changed much since the marquis' time is " the plenitude of meat. And after a day of mountain biking in the hot sun, water, Gatorade and GU my only sustenance, I hit the Iron Horse Saloon, skipped the horseburger, and happily sank my chompers into a thick, juicy, rare buffalo ribeye. The owner, Mark E Shoemaker, looks like a slimmer version of Jerry Garcia and has a framed Woodstock ticket on the wall that he points to and says, " I guess I'm about the only sucker who actually bought one of those things." On Saturday night, Half a Chance, a local duo reminiscent of Cheech and Chong played everything from John Prine to Led Zeppelin in between cracking jokes and hounding the locals to buy their T-shirts. Meanwhile, I was getting hurled around the dance floor by one of the local cowboys. The big talk at the bar was the imminent film shoot of the tentatively titled Wooly Boys sta rring Kris Kristofferson and Peter Fonda. They were call ing for extras. The turtle the Mandan chose to represent determination and steadfastness is an appropriate mascot for anyone mountain biking the trail-not for the trail's technica l difficulty, but for the harsh realities of the surrounding environment. The land, which despite constant erosion, is like the Mandan turtles that mark the Maah Daah Hey-determined to persevere. Here, then, is where mountain biking becomes a metaphor for life . Theodore Roosevelt returned to Medora a year after his first visit, and this time it wasn't to hunt bison but to find solitude and mend a broken heart after his mother and his wife died within hours of each other. Over the period of the next th ree years, he returned often to immerse himself in cattle ranching. In 1887, he • 29