East of Epping toward Minot, US-2 twists up and through a hundred miles of gentle, chocolate-drop hillocks, residuals of the great Ice Age glaciers, with some beautiful rises and plateaus capped by an occasional abandoned squad of dwellings. Along the way, podunk villages whiz by: Ross (pop. 61), for example, is a typically funky old town with some dilapidated, boarded-up buildings and huge grain elevators that look more like spacecraft engines.
The one sizeable place, Stanley (pop. 1,279), resting along the horizon-straight railroad tracks seven miles east of Ross and 47 miles west of Minot, is worth a stop to sample the world’s last working Whirl-a-Whip machine at the old-fashioned soda fountain inside the Dakota Drug Store on Main Street, north of US-2. There’s also a free municipal campground at the north end of town.
Minot marks the junction of US-2 and US-83, The Road to Nowhere, which runs from Canada to Mexico.
