Makoshika State Park

The Lakota name is usually written Mako sica, bad land, a plain warning about ground that was hard to cross. The park that keeps the name runs up from the southeast edge of Glendive into some eleven and a half thousand acres of clay and sandstone, carved into ridges, hoodoos and caprocks and dotted with ponderosa pine and juniper, the largest of Montana's state parks. Glendive people were asking for a park here as early as the 1890s; Dawson County gave the land in 1939 and again in 1953, and the park was established that November.

Most of what the weather has opened is the Hell Creek Formation, the last rock laid down in the age of dinosaurs, and in places the park points out the line where that age ends: the boundary between the Cretaceous and what geologists long called the Tertiary, about 65.5 million years old. Below it lie the dinosaurs; above it the big ones are gone. More than ten kinds have come out of the park, among them Tyrannosaurus, Edmontosaurus and a nearly complete Thescelosaurus, a small and rare plant-eater, and the visitor center at the entrance shows a complete Triceratops skull found inside the boundary.

The rest is a prairie badland that happens to sit at the edge of a town. About half the bird species recorded in Montana have been seen here, and nearly half the state's wildflowers. A scenic road climbs to viewpoints over the breaks, trails drop into the gullies, and there is a campground. Summer heat in the bottoms can be severe.