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| The China Wall from our 2001 trip. |
One of the goals of our 2022 fall trip to the ND Badlands was to revisit some of our favorite places, without having the time pressure of working on a hiking guide. We wanted to spend more time near the North Unit, and one place that topped the list was the China Wall. Since Jean hadn’t hiked the Bennett Trail (she’d taken a rest day when I rode the Cottonwood-Maah Daah Hey-Bennett loop in 2019 (Here)) we decided to hike to the Wall from Bennett Campground.
The previous day had been windy, even by ND standards with gusts projected to 50 mph. Things had seemed to get worse in the afternoon, so we made sure we had an early start, and hoped that the trail along the creek would be sheltered enough from the wind. When we arrived the trailhead the temperature was about 40F, the trailhead was empty, and there was only a small trailer in the campground. The last register sign in was on September 11, and the entire roster for 2022 covered only one page. This would be our third day in a row without seeing any other hikers, we guessed others had the luxury of waiting for the wind to die down.
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| Bennett Trail marker. |
From Bennett CG it is an easy three mile walk to the Maah Daah Hey Trail. There’s a rock hop of Bennett Creek near the start and a potential rock hop of Cottonwood Creek near the far end, otherwise the trail is well marked and easy to follow. We had talked the previous day with a TRNP ranger who’d had to abort a mountain bike trip on the trail due to pockmarking by the cattle that stay close to the creek. But, by the time of our trip the trail surface was reasonably smooth. To the first milepost the trail climbs gently. We saw one spot where the creek’s meanders had carved out several short pillars.
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| Small pillars carved in the canyon of Bennett Creek. |
From my 2019 ride I remembered a spot where the trail was tough to follow right along the creek bank, and another small slump, but both these areas had since been fixed. We both were impressed by the fall colors, both in the trees and even in the grasses. At the Kryzsko Monument we got some great views of our remaining trail to the west.
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| View west from the Kryzsko Monument. |
We saw a few skittish cows, but they were not impacting the trail. We spooked one pheasant.
After
three miles we hit the Maah Daah Hey Trail, and I went into guidebook mode. The
FS had recently relocated part of the trail from the berm of an old, failed
stock pond to the hillside in back of it so I needed to map and measure the
relocation, and update the description. The change added only 0.2 mile to the
trail, but it set me thinking what would happen if enough relocations changed
the overall mileage of the trail. Would that mean all the mileposts would need
to be moved? The new section was still raw from its construction, it will be
another season or more before it is trampled smooth.
After we passed the pond I realized the guidebook used the mileage for the start of the climb for the China Wall, and I’d need to adjust this for the wall itself. There were several sets of bluffs above the creek, and we weren’t sure which one contained the wall.
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| The China Wall from below. |
The climb to the wall begins with a pair of sharp switchbacks, then climbs to a saddle in an unnamed butte that sits in the center of section 3. The trail is carved into a shear badlands wall before you reach the wall along its shear south face. The wall is essentially a thin fin of rock running across the top of a small saddle. It is near vertical on the south side, but gentler on the north.
To tie all our mileages together we walked down the north side in the juniper to the next milepost before hiking back up to eat lunch beside the wall.
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| Close up of the China Wall. |
We’d lucked out with the weather. It was cool, but sunny, and the forecasted lull in the winds was a savior. We would simply need to retrace our route back to reach the trailhead, but the scenery was still pretty enough we didn’t mind at all repeating our route. Back at the car we finished up a 10 mile day, and looked forward to the TRNP South Unit part of our trip.
