Quick: Name the state whose scenic landscape so inspired Teddy Roosevelt that he went on to do his darnedest to preserve America's great parklands by creating the National Forest Service. If you answered North Dakota, pat yourself on the back; the rest of you can take solace in the fact that most people didn't get it right either. This sparsely populated corner of the Great Plains has a lot going for it -- picturesque farmland and wheat fields, the stark beauty of the Badlands, numerous historic sites, and so on -- but it also has something of an identity problem: Even the movie that put one of its major cities on the map, the Coen brothers' Oscar-winning Fargo, was filmed elsewhere. So impassioned have North Dakotans become about forging their own path that it seems to be a sport for residents to try and rename the state every couple of years to prevent it from being that "other Dakota" (no luck so far). Still, outside of Alaska, the Rough Rider State has more unexplored and untainted wilderness than any other. Forget the Wild West; this is truly the final frontier.
