Faces of the Plains: Wild Heart of the Dakotas

Fly from the UK to Williston, USA, then drive to Watford City.

Watford City is your gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and Teddy's Residential Suites makes a relaxed base for two nights. Drive the park's loop road at dusk and you'll likely meet bison grazing beside the road, wild horses on the ridgelines and prairie dogs standing sentry over their towns, all set against the same striped Badlands buttes that convinced a young Theodore Roosevelt to become America's conservation president.

Three nights at the Rough Riders Hotel put you in the heart of Medora, a town that still moves at the pace of the Old West. Spend a morning at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, tracing how this rugged country shaped a president long before it shaped a national park. By day, go deeper into the Badlands tracking bighorn sheep across the canyons, and by evening, settle in for the Medora Pitchfork Fondue Dinner & Show, where steaks are speared onto pitchforks and cooked over open flame before a musical revue closes out the night.

Deadwood hasn't quite let go of 1876, and two nights at The Lodge at Deadwood puts you right in the thick of it. We've included the Deadwood Outlaws Walking Tour, retracing the gunfight that killed Wild Bill Hickok and the gold rush chaos that built these saloon lined streets in the first place.

Three nights at The Rushmore Hotel & Suites make Rapid City your base for the icons of the Black Hills. We've included the Mount Rushmore & Crazy Horse Tour, standing beneath the four granite presidents before turning to the Crazy Horse Memorial, a mountain carving of the Lakota leader that has been underway since 1948 and is still nowhere near finished. Custer State Park is a short drive away too, where the Wildlife Loop Road runs straight through one of the largest publicly owned bison herds on Earth.

Fly from Sioux Falls to the UK.