NORTH DAKOTA (USA)

Write a review or view peoples experiences in North Dakota	Hotels	Flights	Car Hire/Rental

Want to contribute to the writings of this travel guide? If so, Click here

North Dakota has no nationally recognizable landmarks, unlike its southern neighbour South Dakota boasting 'Mount Rushmore' nor is the state of North Dakota's history particularly lurid or glamorous. It seems like somebody's quiet afterthought, a place to pass through. Grain silos loom on the horizon; the haystacks resemble loaves of bread. In the summer, with the sun baking in a defiantly blue sky and the wind raking strong fingers through tall fields of golden wheat and flax, North Dakota epitomizes all things rural American. Charming, picturesque - and a bit maddening.

The influx of Europeans into the Dakota Territory, spurred by the Homestead Act of 1862, precipitated a population and agricultural boom that lasted into the twentieth century. As in South Dakota, the fertile east is more thickly settled than the west, where vast cattle and sheep ranges predominate, and it was the east that was hardest hit by the so-called 500-year flood of 1997, when 1.7 million low-lying acres of farmland were inundated, and the entire state was declared a disaster area.

From Fargo , the state's largest city, I-94 passes through the central capital of Bismarck , and on to the Bad Lands of the west, once cherished by President Theodore Roosevelt. Though the national park bearing his name is a key destination, Roosevelt would surely not be pleased about the continuing disfiguration of much of western North Dakota by strip mining operations.

North Dakota has a Sub-humid continental climate.

Annual mean precipitation ranges from 13 inches in the northwest to more than 20 inches in the southeast.

Average yearly temperature ranges from 37 degrees F in the northeast to 43 degrees in the south.

January, the coldest month, average temperatures range from 2 degrees F in the northeast to 17 degrees F in the southwest.

July, the warmest month, average temperatures range from 67 degrees F in the northeast 73 degrees F in the south.