Medora, on the far western edge of North Dakota, is a Midwest mountain biking magnet that draws riders in the same way the slickrock trails outside Moab, Utah, have called bikers to the Southwest for years. Not quite the mountains, not quite the desert, but somewhere in between, Medora is a gold mine of sweet, challenging singletrack against a backdrop of multicolored canyons, prairie dogs and a dusty, rugged landscape.

Given North Dakota’s tumbleweed reputation, I know it’s hard to believe.

But look west of North Dakota’s center and capital, Bismarck, and the topography boasts breathtaking change. Flat prairies graduate to a fat Missouri River and tall, rolling grasslands. By the time you hit the border with Montana, it’s like a chunk of the wild west.

This is no secret to my Midwest mountain biking friends. It’s why I keep coming back.

“It’s great riding,” trail guide Simon Stewart said to me last summer as we plunged into a series of picturesque canyon switchbacks during a three-hour ride. Stewart spent last season guiding tours here with the Dakota Cyclery of Bismarck.

“It’s untapped,” he said, in his light Irish brogue. “People just don’t believe you until they see it for themselves. This is the place to be in the summer when Colorado and Utah get too hot.”

Rough rider country
Long known as “rough rider country,” Medora has been a source of this kind of adventure for more than a century. The region, which includes the Little Missouri National Grasslands, holds a beauty unique to the Midwest.

That’s what first brought Teddy Roosevelt to Medora back in 1883. Following the lead of explorers such as Lewis and Clark, and then a smattering of French settlers including an aristocrat named the Marquis de Mores, the future U.S. president had decided to take up a career in ranching among the Badlands canyons.

Roosevelt spent the next years of his life traveling back and forth from the East Coast to the Badlands — hunting bison, raising cattle — before he became president in 1901.

“I never would have been president if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota,” he later said.

That’s probably the biggest reason the Theodore Roosevelt National Park just outside Medora was named in the president’s honor. It’s also among the least-visited national parks, with only about 500,000 visitors per year.

The state hopes to increase that traffic. For years the town of Medora, population 100, has held “The Medora Musical,” a summerlong stage production that features a singing version of Roosevelt, and it has been home to a variety of equestrian rides in and near the park.

Now the state is trying to lure mountain bikers.

“When you spend a day in Medora it’s amazing how many bikes you see,” said Rachel Retterath of the North Dakota Tourism Division. “We want it to grow. We definitely expect it to grow. People are coming to North Dakota for outdoor adventure.”

Mapping the trails
For more than a decade now, Loren Morlock, owner of Dakota Cyclery in Bismarck, has been mapping North Dakota trails and has essentially defined the state’s mountain-bike culture.

Though off-road riding is prohibited within the national park, the nonprofit Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation teamed with Morlock in the early ’90s to open a bike shop and lead rides through the Little Missouri Grasslands bordering the park.

“It’s endless — absolutely endless,” he told me, not long after he began leading the rides. “It’s one of the coolest places I’ve ever ridden.”

I’ve known Loren more than half my life. When I was growing up in Bismarck, he rode with my parents and sold me my first bike, a silver Centurion roadie, on which I commuted to school. Ten years later, after I returned to Bismarck to write for my hometown paper, he sold me my first real mountain bike, a Specialized Stumpjumper M2.

Throughout the mid-’90s, I rode with Loren, his wife, Jennifer, and the growing community of Bismarck mountain bikers as they ventured west. It was about then, too, that Russ Walsh, a trails coordinator for the U.S. Forest Service, started mapping some of the nearly 1 million acres of grasslands to connect the north and south units of the national park, about 70 miles apart.

In 1999 the Forest Service christened the Maah Daah Hey Trail, a 120-mile hiking, biking and equestrian trail that runs inside, outside and next to the park. The name comes from the Mandan Indian language, meaning “an area that has been or will be around for a long time.”

Walsh hasn’t tracked numbers but says the trail’s popularity is evident.

“Just over the last five years, the whole length of the trail has become well-defined by use,” Walsh said. In the grasslands, he said, all the Forest Service did was stake and mow the trail; now it’s 12-inch-wide singletrack.

“We thought it’d be a million years before the amount of use would actually create the trail, but it happened. We didn’t ever think it would become as popular and as used as much as it is now.”

The Morlocks are banking on that kind of talk.

In March, after more than 20 years of running their Bismarck bike shop, Loren and Jennifer sold their Main Street store with plans to move their business to Medora full-time.

They’re also teaming with a national adventure outfitter company, Escape Adventures of Las Vegas, to offer guided tours along the Maah Daah Hey, where riders camp along the trail with full accommodations. A second outfitter, Western Spirit Cycling Adventures of Moab, Utah, is also offering tours.

“I call those the ‘catered’ tours, and they’re really a first-class experience,” Jennifer said.

For Walsh, it’s all better than he could have imagined when he began mapping trails 14 years ago.

“People going out to Montana stop in Medora for a few days, or even make it a destination now,” Walsh said. “It’s actually becoming a destination — which is what we’re here for.”

This, of course, isn’t news to me. It’s just one more reason to visit home.