4 Best Sights in Billings, Little Big Horn, and the Montana Plains, Montana

Interpretive signs explain the geology of the rock layers visible on the ½-mi loop of the Cap Rock Nature Trail, which begins on Cains Coulee Road, a few miles from the park entrance. The trail affords excellent views of a natural rock bridge. Beginning at the campground, the 1.5-mi Diane Gabriel Trail loops through both badlands and prairie terrain. At the halfway point a duck-billed-dinosaur fossil is embedded in a cliff. The.5-mi Kinney Coulee Trail starts about 4 mi south of the park entrance and leads 300 feet down a canyon. The terrain here is a bit more forested than elsewhere in the park, but the rock formations are the real stars.

The drive from Makoshika State Park to Fort Peck will take you along the Hi-Line, otherwise known as U.S. 2. Drive Highway 200 to Circle, then north on Highway 13, one of Montana's designated Scenic Backcountry Byways, or drive north through the wide, fertile Yellowstone River valley on Highway 16 to Sidney, then Culbertson, where you'll catch U.S. Highway 2. Either way, you'll travel through the Fort Peck Reservation. Like most of eastern Montana, much of the land here is beautifully austere; at nearly 2 million acres, the reservation is home to only 9,400 tribal members. However, the reservation does have a bustling industrial center, a community college, and an interesting tribal cultural center and museum in Poplar.

Named after the Lakota word for "bad land," Makoshika State Park encompasses more than 11,000 acres of Montana's badlands, distinct rock formations also found in Wyoming and the Dakotas. The bare rock walls and mesas of the park create an eerie moonscape that is only occasionally broken by a crooked pine or juniper tree warped by the hard rock and lack of water. Practically a desert, the badlands are excellent fossil grounds, and the remains of tyrannosaurs and triceratops have been found here.