2016 Summer Mountain Trip Part 11; Lonely US Route 85 in the Dakotas

Following spending the night in Belle Fourche my destination was in North Dakota in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. From US Route 212 in Belle Fourche it was a solid 174 miles north to Interstate I-95 on a desolate stretch of US Route 85.

This blog entry serves as Part 11 of the 2016 Mountain Trip series, Part 10 can be found here:

2016 Summer Mountain Trip Part 10; Devil's Tower National Monument

US Route 85 north of Belle Fourche in South Dakota traverses through rural Butte County and Harding County. Between Belle Fourche and the North Dakota State Line there isn't much to capture the interest. The site of interest I did find was the ghost town of Redig in southern Harding County. Oddly Redig is something I've never been able to find much information on as it rarely ever appears on historical maps. The community has an abandoned service station that appears to have been last in use in the mid-20th century. There was no apparent signs of life amid the abandoned buildings and derelict cars.

US 85 enters North Dakota in Bowman County. The first real town north from Belle Fourche is the County Seat in Bowman at the junction of US 12. I stopped in Bowman for a refill of gas and a bag of M&Ms before continuing northward on US 85.

US 85 enters Slope County north of Bowman County. I stopped in Amidon which is the second least populated incorporated County Seat in the United States with a population of 20. Amidon was founded in 1910 and was anticipated to be a rail siding of a Milwaukee Road Railroad branch line that ultimately never made it to the community. When Slope County was split from Billings County in 1914 Amidon became the county seat. Amidon was the last North Dakota County seat to receive electricity by 1950. Apparently Amidon once had a population of about 150 in the 1920s but along with Slope County has declined. Reportedly the Amidon County Post Office closed in 2018.

North of Amidon US 85 enters Stark County where it meets I-94 in Belfield. From Belfield I entered I-94 west towards Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Part 12 of the 2016 Summer Mountain Trip Series can be found here:

2016 Summer Mountain Trip Part 12; Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I-94, and Old US 10

Comments

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population. The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

Gribblenation

Search This Blog