Yellowstone

Our kids had fall break at the end of last week. We decided to take a quick trip up to Yellowstone to celebrate. We drove to Rexburg on Thursday and stayed overnight with our friends, the Smiths. (They are the ones who own Pizza Pie Cafe.) It was fun to see them again. We went to Pizza Pie Cafe for dinner. We picked up Kelsi Meyer (niece) and took her with us. It was fun to see her even though it was only for a little bit (sorry no pictures.) Thanks for coming with us at the last minute, Kelsi. The Smiths have a motor home that they turned into a guest house for us. The kids had fun sleeping in it.

Thursday we drove to Yellowstone.

I love the framing and colors in this picture at Artist's Point

We hiked down to the lower falls. It was a pretty steep hike.

We drove up to Mammoth. We saw the calcium carbonate terraces and a lot of animals. We saw elk, bison, fox, chipmunk. We really wanted to see a wolf too, but didn't see one.

The most exciting part of the day was that we saw a grizzly bear. It was pretty far away to begin with. It started heading up from the river toward the road. When we were pretty sure where it was going to go, we hopped back into the car and went to find it. It crossed the road right in front of us. It was pretty cool.

We stayed in the appropriately named Three Bears Lodge in West Yellowstone on Friday night. Before we went into Yellowstone on Saturday, we went to the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center. We saw some bears and wolves and birds of prey in captivity. It was pretty cold.

As we were walking around, we ran into one of my former Chinese professors from BYU. His wife taught mark at star talk a couple of years ago. Mark wasn't with us, but she remembered him. We talked to them for a while. Just as we were wrapping up with them, we saw two of the kid history guys (Brett and John)  and their families watching the bears. We tried to get Lauren to take a picture with them, but she refused.

I did take a picture of Brett. Lauren called me a stalker.

Silly Bwett

Saturday in Yellowstone, we went the southern route toward Old Faithful. It was over 20 degrees colder on Saturday than it was on Friday. The funniest couple helped us take the following picture. They were a black couple from L.A. and were super friendly and funny.

Hard to tell where the geyser ends and the clouds begin 

A Danish lady came up and sat down on the bench right between Lauren and Ryan while we were waiting for the geyser to erupt. She was really friendly and we talked to her for a while. She shared some Danish "candy" with us. It was kind of like the horehound candy from pioneer times. It was pretty nasty. Old Faithful was spectacular as usual.

Clowning around at Old Faithful

We had to hurry back to Rexburg on Saturday afternoon because we had made an appointment for Lauren to feed the bear cubs at Grizzly World just outside of Rexburg. For the uninitiated, Grizzly World is a place you can drive through and see bears (mostly black) right by your car. They also have a petting zoo, corn maze, spud chucker (sling shots that can throw a potato about 250 yards) and carnival rides. When Lauren heard that you could sign up to feed the cubs, she really wanted to do it. It was only Lauren and one other kid who had signed up, so she got to feed several bottles to the bears.

Lauren feeding a bear cub

We spent the night with the Smiths again on Saturday night and went to church with them Sunday morning. We drove home after that. We all had a really fun trip and plan on doing it again someday.