May has been one heck of a month. Spent a week up in the SNF fishing, with a stop to fly-fish the Baptism at Tettegouche, and a few days at a crappie hole near Fifty Lakes... then this last weekend, we headed out to western North Dakota to do some canoeing in the heart of the Badlands.

I've been trying to run this river since 2005, and even though semi-low flow conditions blocked our attempt at the entire 110-mile stretch between the national park units, it still made for a spectacular trip.

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Great report!  Looks like a great way to spend a couple days...

I'm glad you guys enjoyed it. The weather has been uncooperative for the last few weeks, but it's springtime, so I guess it is what it is.

st, no trout that I'm aware of, but we did scare up some carp-looking things... which came as a surprise to me, because I thought the Little Missouri was too shallow and silty for fish to live in. According to the ND Game and Fish website, the river does have catfish and sauger.

Perhaps we'll give it another run next spring, if we can manage to get there during higher flow. April is always a good bet for getting out into the Badlands... though given a choice, I'd still rather be out in the north country. More tree cover, clear waters, and less rattlesnakes...

No idea. For most of the trip, the water was withing a paddle blade or two for depth, with gravel bars all over the place, but I suppose that doesn't mean that such holes can't exist. The two fish that swam by the canoes, and the dead one we found along the banks, didn't look like either species to me. I should have taken a picture... it's also possible that the ND GF Dept. surveyed the river where it meets the Missouri, in which case finding cats and sauger wouldn't be too surprising.

There was a guy that looked like he was fishing near the bridge in Medora, but he was upstream and we were in a hurry, so we didn't get the chance to inquire. I'll see if any of the other guys snapped a pic of the dead one...

Kawishiway wrote on May 28^th, 2009 at 10:47am:



Glad you enjoyed the report. It seems to me that far less people come to ND's badlands, most preferring the sharper, more extreme topography of the badlands in SD. Friends of mine back home in MSP often say, "I didn't know ND had badlands." Keeps out the riff-raff 


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I attached a picture I took a few weeks ago, looking down into the Red River Valley from the Pembina Escarpment, an area of N-S trending topographic relief which marks the Valley's western edge. The picture was taken along a road leading to Mountain, ND, perhaps the most ironic town name in the eastern part of the state. This escarpment wasn't the edge of Lake Agassiz, but it was cut out by the pre-Agassiz 'Red' river as it meandered through the valley below. But it's still easy to see that you're looking down into a vast lake bed / flood plain.

It's also not hard to imagine why so much land gets covered when the Red River rises in the spring. North of Grand Forks just over a month ago, the river was seven miles wide. As of right now, it's back to its normal width of less than 100 yards.