Weekend at Fort Ransom...

Joey and I had the nicest time camping this weekend, about 90 miles southwest of Fargo at Fort Ransom State Park. The park features hiking/biking/horse trails (snowmobiling in the winter), and a demonstration farm.

The Sheyenne River runs through the park. It's not the same as the Cheyenne River, which I'd heard of before – I checked.

The park is the kind of facility you don't see on the East Coast. It was immaculately maintained, with a half-dozen short trails. Some sections of the trails wander through light forest, and other parts literally cut through grassland – they're just mowed across the fields. Some of them are nature trails, with wooden markers every once in a while marked "A," "B," and so forth. We didn't have a key to what the markers were supposed to be referring to, but Joey enjoyed biking the alphabet.

What's amazing is that the park is lightly enough trafficked that we didn't see a soul most of our time out; indeed, it looked like the trails had been cut just for us:

Anything like this out East would be positively crawling with people. Joey and I biked all over the place. Joe wiped out a few times on the gravel roads, but found his footing by the end of the weekend. We had much better luck on the grass trails – it was like biking on a golf course.

We were treated to a tour of the demonstration farm Saturday morning by a park ranger, which was pretty impressive. The parkland was donated by the family of the farmer who first farmed it beginning in the late 1800s. A local group called the Fort Ransom Sodbusters Association has assembled a mighty army of vintage farming implements on the farm, and shows them off a few times a year at the park. They've built some massive barns on site to hold all their equipment. The next Sodbuster Days is Sept. 9 & 10, and we may have to make it back out there.

After the tour of the farm site, Joey and I strolled through the fields, and checked out the corn plants. We startled a few deer, which bolted out of the stand of corn.

Just outside the park is "Pyramid Hill," which has apparently astonished nearby folks for centuries. Locals insist such a perfectly formed pyramid must have been shaped by human hands; geologists disagree.

A state-sponsored scenic marker pokes a finger in the eye of townspeople by not only siding with the geologists, but also by superimposing Pyramid Hill atop a photo of a real pyramid, in Egypt, which is much, much bigger. Even if industrious prehistoric Ransom County people built themselves a pyramid, the marker clearly seems to suggest, they built themselves a puny one.

But it is undisputed that the statue of the Viking sitting atop Pyramid Hill is manmade, erected by the heavily Norwegian community to show some pride. The state marker notes the statue's origins, and also notes that it was almost toppled over by winds a few years back and shows a decided backwards tilt now. (It's not a very nice thing to immortalize on a state sign.)

Midday on Saturday, Joey and I left the park to go into the town of Fort Ransom (population 102) to look around and get some ice for the cooler. We stopped in Hartley's Cupcakes Cafe and Gift Shop...

...where Joey had a big ice-cream cone, and I had a Dr. Pepper from the fountain. Total: a whopping $2.30. (Note the Viking on the left – they're all over around here.) We bought a bag of ice from the bar across the street (a reasonable $1.50), and as we left, the folks in the bar were delighted to see a group of about 30 motorcycles and their fairly tough-looking riders arriving for refreshments.

The weather was completely cooperative. It was perfect bicycling weather during the days. It drizzled Friday overnight, just enough to be comforting, and sprinkled on us a little late Saturday evening as we listened to a lecture on Union Gen. Ransom (for whom the county, a decommissioned fort, the town, and the park are named). Everything dried off by the time we had to pack up Sunday morning, and it then rained cats and dogs on us all the way back. Couldn't have been better timing.