Close Encounters of an Ungulate Kind

I'm usually not a super spontaneous person but I have a close friend who is and that is how I ended up driving eight and a half hours to Badlands National Park in South Dakota earlier this summer. We had agreed that we would meet at a Wal-Mart in Rapid City and then carpool into the park itself. We pulled up to the campsite at around four o'clock and started to unpack our things. A few bison were up in the hills surrounding the campsite but we weren't incredibly worried as there were about ten other tents in the area. We set the tent up and were eating our soup when the bison started to come down off the hills and meander into the campsite. My friend had mentioned that the website warned about bison frequenting the camp but we were both familiar with them and knew how to behave intelligently in their presence. As they wandered through camp looking for something to scratch themselves on, we would just move out of their way until they were no longer a threat and then resume whatever we had been doing. We marveled at their size and strength as they scratched themselves on our picnic table and grazed in the middle of the camp. That was in the daylight though.

It rained the entire night. It was so windy that it uprooted a corner of our tent and we were outside in the dead of night shoving the stakes back into the ground. We didn't realize until the following evening how much of a blessing that rain would turn out to be. As we listened to the pounding of the rain, we could hear a slight munching in the background. It would start to our left and slowly move around the tent. It turns out, bison don't limit their eating to daylight hours and had continued their grazing around our tent. After hours of restlessness due to the rain, wind, and anxiety about bison proximity, we finally drifted off to sleep.

Morning came and the bison had returned to their hillsides once more. My friend and I headed off to spend the day in the park and returned later for a nap. We woke up around six o'clock and made dinner. The clear skies off in the distance promised a rain-free night and we went to bed feeling better about our situation. Then the bison came back.

They started off as they had the night before by grazing around our tent. As this had happened previously, my friend and I weren't super worried but stayed up late talking anyway. We were in the middle of a conversation when one of the bison decided our tent was more interesting than the grass it had been munching on. It started to nibble on our tent and the walls would ripple wherever it touched them. All conversation stopped at that point; we just laid there in silence and hoped that it would move on. This continued for a bit and then the bison started to gently push it's head against the tent walls. That was when we decided this was no longer fun. We slowly unzipped the front of the tent and I stuck my head outside with a flashlight. The path from the tent to the car was clear so we gathered our sleeping bags, put on our jackets, and CALMLY WALKED to the car. We then proceeded to spend the rest of the night in the car sleeping amongst the dirty dishes and lawn chairs. Bison are only fun from a distance, people.