Maah Daah Hey Trail
A 144-mile nonmotorized route threads badlands, grassland, river crossings, and working ranch country.
Places and wildlife — page 22
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park
Mandan earthlodge history and a reconstructed cavalry post share one Missouri River terrace.
Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site
Village depressions, an earthlodge, and river trails interpret centuries of Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara life.
North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum
North Dakota’s state museum makes geology refuse to stay in the distant past: ancient seas, glaciation, grasslands, Indigenous homelands, agriculture, settlement, and energy remain causally connected across four galleries.
Plains Art Museum
A renovated warehouse presents contemporary art with particular strength in the northern Plains.
North Dakota Museum of Art
A university museum pairs ambitious contemporary exhibitions with a focused permanent collection and sculpture garden.
Fargo Air Museum
Two hangars of restored and sometimes airworthy aircraft bring northern aviation history to full scale, with volunteers and visible mechanical detail making the collection far more than a row of polished machines.
Dickinson Museum Center
A compact western North Dakota campus pairs dinosaur fossils and regional history with seasonal machinery halls and guided pioneer buildings.
North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame
More than 40 exhibits connect Plains horse culture, homesteading, ranch work, and rodeo achievement.
Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site
A preserved missile alert facility and nearby silo expose the routine infrastructure of nuclear deterrence.
Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site
A reconstructed Upper Missouri trade post makes commerce, diplomacy, labor, and cultural negotiation visible where the Yellowstone meets the Missouri.
Fort Buford State Historic Site
Surviving military buildings interpret an Upper Missouri post active from 1866 to 1895.
Chateau de Morès State Historic Site
An 1883 summer home anchors the story of an ambitious meatpacking venture and the town built around it.
Double Ditch Indian Village State Historic Site
A Mandan city survives as negative space above the Missouri: lodge depressions, refuse mounds, and four successive fortification ditches reveal three centuries of growth, contraction, trade, and loss.
Huff Indian Village State Historic Site
A remarkably intact fifteenth-century Mandan village plan remains visible beside the Missouri River.
Menoken Indian Village State Historic Site
An eight-hundred-year-old fortified village documents an early shift toward settled Plains agriculture.
International Peace Garden
Formal gardens, conservatory collections, and memorial landscapes occupy the United States–Canada border.
Lake Metigoshe State Park
Wooded Turtle Mountain lakes support paddling, hiking, winter trails, and a biological station far from badlands imagery.
Cross Ranch State Park
Cottonwood forest protects one of the Missouri River’s last free-flowing stretches.
Icelandic State Park
Homestead buildings, Icelandic heritage, woodland trails, and Lake Renwick meet in one northeastern park.
Pembina Gorge State Recreation Area
A forested river gorge provides hiking, paddling, horseback riding, and motorized routes near the Canadian border.
Dakota Zoo
A riverfront zoo focuses on approachable scale, northern-climate animals, and family learning.
Red River Zoo
Cold-climate species and conservation education define a compact Fargo zoo.
Chahinkapa Zoo
A compact Wahpeton zoo makes individual histories, daily care, and conservation breeding easier to follow across more than 200 animals from six continents.
Roosevelt Park Zoo
North Dakota’s oldest zoo presents a broad collection in a rebuilt Souris River park landscape.
North American Bison Discovery Center
Museum exhibits explain the bison's ecology, near-eradication, and recovery beside a pasture where a living herd may be visible.
Enchanted Highway
Thirty-two miles of North Dakota county road turn scrap steel into a civic rescue attempt, spacing giant geese, grasshoppers, fish, pheasants, deer, and people across working prairie.
Scandinavian Heritage Park
Buildings and monuments interpret the five Nordic countries through immigrant memory in a free urban park.
Audubon National Wildlife Refuge
Prairie wetlands and Lake Sakakawea shoreline create a major migration and breeding landscape on the Missouri Coteau.
Turtle River State Park
A wooded Turtle River valley offers hiking, skiing, camping, and trout water close to Grand Forks.
Little Missouri State Park
More than 40 miles of hiking and horse trails enter a remote badlands maze where clay, weather, gates, and private-land boundaries determine the day’s route.
Badlands National Park
A fossil-rich wall of pinnacles and mixed-grass prairie rewards both roadside looking and deliberate walking.
Custer State Park
Granite needles, prairie basins, lakes, and a free-ranging bison herd make this much more than a scenic drive.
Wind Cave National Park
Rare boxwork passages lie beneath a prairie where bison, elk, and prairie dogs still shape the surface.
Jewel Cave National Monument
A breathing Black Hills cave turns air pressure into an exploration clue, leading from a small natural entrance to more than 200 mapped miles of calcite-lined passage.
Good Earth State Park at Blood Run
Trails cross part of a major Oneota and Indigenous trading landscape beside the Big Sioux River.
Bear Butte State Park
An isolated volcanic formation is also a sacred place for multiple Plains nations, requiring a quieter kind of hike.
Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway
A limestone gorge links waterfalls, spruce forest, trailheads, and one of the Black Hills’ best short drives.
Black Elk Peak
The highest summit east of the Rockies combines a strenuous granite hike, fire-tower views, and a culturally important landscape.
George S. Mickelson Trail
A 109-mile crushed-stone rail trail crosses tunnels, trestles, mining towns, and forested Black Hills grades.
Mount Rushmore National Memorial
A colossal granite carving, presidential narrative, engineering feat, and contested Black Hills monument occupy the same site.
Crazy Horse Memorial
A privately operated, still-unfinished mountain carving shares space with cultural collections and a complex debate over representation.
Minuteman Missile National Historic Site
A control center, missile silo, and museum explain how nuclear crews lived inside continuous Cold War readiness.
Historic Deadwood
A gold-rush town preserves dense architecture, cemetery stories, and the uneasy distance between history and casino entertainment.
The Mammoth Site
More than sixty mammoths remain where they died inside a climate-controlled active paleontological dig.
Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village
An active archaeological site preserves a thousand-year-old village and makes field methods visible to visitors.
The Journey Museum & Learning Center
Geology, archaeology, Lakota culture, and pioneer history unfold as one connected account of the Black Hills and western South Dakota.
South Dakota Art Museum
Harvey Dunn, Oscar Howe, Native art, and contemporary work make “South Dakota art” visibly plural.