Tuesday, October 11

HOME ON THE RANGE.

Day 365 – ONE YEAR ON THE ROAD – Oct. 11, 2021 to Oct. 11, 2022. Oh my goodness. We did it. One year. And we’re still loving it. Today we had a nice surprise awaiting us at Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge. For us, a celebration of one year on the road.

It was 55 degrees this morning when we got up, sunny and windy. The winds are supposed to increase for a couple of days. We paid for another two nights at this campsite. We drove northeast to a different wildlife refuge, Fort Niobrara NWR near Valentine, NE.

Valentine was a nice little town, looked like a nice place to live, and we stopped at a great store that had a wonderful deli and bakery, plus an Amish grocery store and some homemade gifts & goods. Old Mill was the perfect place to get sandwiches to go for our trip the the NWR, and we vowed to come back for pizza to-go for dinner.

Arriving at the National Wildlife Refuge, we passed over the Niobrara River, a designated National Scenic River, where they had ample parking for the busy summer months of canoeing, kayaking, and tubing. The parking lot happened to be empty this time of year. We drove on to the NWR headquarters and Visitor’s Center.

The Refuge headquarters/Visitor’s Center, normally open Monday thru Friday, were closed with a note on the door. And this was our surprise and cause for celebration: “Visitor’s Center Closed for Bison Round-up beginning October 11. Come see us at the Corrals.” For us, this was great news. We had thought we’d missed our big chance to watch a Bison/Buffalo Round-up when we couldn’t get a campsite for Custer State Park’s annual event. And here we’d stumbled upon a much smaller, more intimate event which allowed us to be right there watching when they brought the Bison into the corral for their examinations and medical testing.

The Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge had a herd of 360+ free-ranging Bison. Yearly, they are rounded up and brought to the corrals in groups of about ten, where one-by-one they are examined and tested as part of a program to monitor the health of the herd. This year, there will be about 60 extra Bison that will be donated to the InterTribal Bison Council. (The ITBC works with a diverse coalition of private, public, government, and tribal stake holders to create an intricate bison management system with a common goal to assist in the restoration of self-sustaining Bison herds on tribal lands.) The NWR can only sustain about 360 Bison at their facility; the extra are given a new place to dwell.

After eating our lunch at picnic tables at the corrals, we drove through the rest of the NWR. The wind had picked up and clouds had come in. The temperature dropped 15 degrees from a high of 77 degrees. We felt so privileged to have been able to watch the round up.

We drove back to Valentine and stopped again at Old Mill to order our pizza and do a little grocery shopping. On the way back to the RV, we stopped to fill 3 four-and-a-half-gallon water jugs at the main campground. We don’t have drinking water at our campground. The pizza smelled SO good. Back at the RV, we celebrated one year on the road with our pizza and a glass of wine and a glass of beer.