Today we saw lots of stuff. That includes a bear. A bear! Another bear! I can’t believe it, except this time we saw a grizzly bear. It was way cooler this time because the bear was eating. Well, the black bear we saw yesterday was munching on grass. But this grizzly bear was eating a fresh kill for lunch!! We stared through the binoculars at her. We could not see what she was eating but we later learned that it was a baby elk. Poor elk! A park ranger started telling us about her. She was once seen beside the road nursing two cubs of her own. Later, she was seen nursing four cubs! It turns out that two of the cubs were hers and the other two were her mother’s (basically she was nursing her sisters or brothers) who was too old to nurse. I did see a little blood peeking out from the grass. And, suddenly, she looked up from her nap! And the park ranger said that was because she smelled another bear, which was trying to get food and smelled her elk. She had to protect it; it was her meal for dinner too. It was so exciting seeing a bear eating fresh kill!
We saw an elk. This time, there is a reason I am writing about more elk. This specific elk was a male elk, with horns and all that good stuff. He was just eating grass along the hill, lazily, pretending not to notice all the cameras directed at him. He had proud, tall, velvety antlers sticking out from his head. He looked magnificent! Like all elk should. He would eat nonstop, and then look up, away from us being very leader like even though there was no one to lead. It was nice stopping to say hi to him, but we had to get along with our trip.
We were walking to the next trail when I saw a chipmunk. I had the camera and did what fate told me to do, which was take a picture. Then, I showed my mom and said, “Look at the beautiful picture of you!” She tried to look mad, but she couldn’t help it.
Oh no! More smelly rotten eggs! By the way, the steam from the geysers smells like rotten eggs because
of the sulfur. We were going to see mud pools. They are hot sizzling pools of mud. I liked them, because my mom thought they were bleh. But right when we opened the door, simultaneously we all gasped ew and squeezed our noses tight. It really was more disgusting than rotten eggs. Way, way, way more! So I had to hold my nose all the way there. The first one was bubbly, bubbly, and smelly. That basically explains all of them. One of the coolest, though, was the Mud Volcano which usually spouted mud just like a volcano. Sadly, it busted too much and blew away the whole cone, leaving a bubbly mud pool. It was mice knowing how cool nature used to be.
The next one was called Dragon Mouth Spring. It smelled also. It was mud, spouting and bubbling, flicking and churning, not much different than the others. So I decided to make a joke out of the title. “This dragon has bad breath. He should try a couple hundred mints,” I said, holding my nose. And it sure did make my mom laugh. It didn’t turn out too bad, my mom said we saw all the colorful bacteria mats, and now we should see the dark side (all the springs were black). I guess I now knew that nature can be pretty and smelly at the same time. I was not sick of nature yet, or springs, so I wanted to see more. We drove to the RV Park, looking joyfully upon the pictures of the bear and the elk.
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