04/21/2026
Did you know Teddy Roosevelt visited Medicine Rocks State Park? In 1883, before it was a park, he visited Southeast Montana on a hunting trip and camped there. He wrote admiringly about the rock formations and even carved his name on one of them. Today, the inscription has eroded away due to the elements, but his writings remain.
If you are visiting the grand opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora on July 4th, stop by the park to follow Teddy's travels! Just don't carve on the rocks!
Experience more history like this by joining us on our Epoch Excursions! Visit various historical and fossil sites as you participate in science!
"Over an irregular tract of gently rolling sandy hills, perhaps about three quarters of a mile square, were scattered several hundred detached and isolated buttes or cliffs of sandstone, each butte from fifteen to fifty feet high, and from thirty to a couple of hundred feet across. Some of them rose as sharp peaks or ridges, or as connected chains, but much the greater number had flat tops like little table-lands. The sides were perfectly perpendicular, and were cut and channeled by the weather into the most extraordinary forms; caves, columns, battlements, spires, and flying buttresses were mingled in the strangest confusion. Many of the caves were worn clear through the buttes, and they were at every height in the sides, while ledges ran across the faces, and shoulders and columns jutted out from the corners. On the tops and at the bases of most of the cliffs grew pine trees, some of considerable height, and the sand gave everything a clean, white look. Altogether it was as fantastically beautiful a place as I have ever seen: it seemed impossible that the hand of man should not have had something to do with its formation. There was a spring of clear cold water a few hundred yards off, with good feed for the horses round it; and we made our camp at the foot of one of the largest buttes, building a roaring pine-log fire in an angle in the face of the cliff, while our beds were under the pine trees. It was the time of the full moon, and the early part of the night was clear. The flame of the fire leaped up the side of the cliff, the red light bringing out into lurid and ghastly relief the bold corners and strange-looking escarpments of the rock, while against it the stiff limbs of the pines stood out like rigid bars of Iron. Walking off out of sight of the circle of firelight, among the tall crags, the place seemed almost as unreal as if we had been in fairy-land." - Teddy Roosevelt
