One of the reasons we spent the entire day in Boulder after church instead of driving on down the road to our next destination was that we were going to go to the Lewis and Clark Caverns, and we didn’t want to do that on a Sunday, and they probably weren’t even open on a Sunday.
Anyway, so after we got up and got ready to go, we drove down to the Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park. I think it’s a state park, anyway. We stopped to take some pictures along the way because the road went through a beautiful little canyon with the river on one side and some really cool rock formations in the little hill mountains in the distance around the bend of the river.
When we got to the Lewis and Clark Caverns, unfortunately, we found out that they were not doing tours at this point in the year, having stopped I think a few weeks prior?
So we scratched that one off the list, and then made our way south to West Yellowstone where we had planned to visit some kind of a grizzly bear and wolf nature reserve.
Sadly, when we got there, we realized that it was more of a zoo than the nature reserve that we were expecting. I was picturing something like the huge reserves in Africa where the animals are protected (at least as best they can) but still get to live in a wild setting.
This… Was not that. 😕
I have a hard enough time sometimes with domesticated animals, feeling like I want them to be able to run free and do whatever they want to do. I love animals, and I love pets, but I’m definitely quite conflicted.
It’s 20 times harder to see wild animals stuck in small paddocks, where they live out there entire lives unable to be free.
I despise zoos.
Is it cool to see animals that you wouldn’t see otherwise? Of course. But I don’t want to see them in that situation. I hate seeing them unable to live the lives they were born to live.
The one saving grace that this place had was that at least a large number of the animals they had in the preserve would have been euthanized if they had not been sent to that place. Injured birds, eagles, owls, etc. And the grizzly bears that had gotten to close to human populations without showing any fear. Normally, if relocation doesn’t work, then the bears are euthanized. Fortunately for these bears, instead of being euthanized, they were sent to this little zoo. I guess that’s better than dying, so there was some good that came of it, but it still hard to see these animals in confined spaces. 😕
I think my mom took it pretty hard, as well. She feels similarly as I do and it was rough on her. She was apologizing to me because it was her idea to go there, but it was simply a misunderstanding of what it was that we were going to see there. As she says, no harm, no foul.
After West Yellowstone, our next objective was to drive down the western side of the Grand Teton mountains. One of my brothers is interested in moving out to that side of the Tetons, and I’ve never seen the Tetons, so I thought it would be fun to drive down the west side to see the area where my brother is interested in living, and then to swing over the pass and drive back up the east side, the side that most people are familiar with because of Jackson hole.
So we did the drive down south, and it was quite pretty. I stopped to take pictures on a very regular basis, catching the light in certain ways over the bright green fields with the majestic Teton mountains in the distance.
I did have a fairly hysterical moment when, as we were talking about the lands in that area, and the number of French names, we were talking about the origins of those French names, and for the first time in my life, having never thought about it previously, I looked up the origin of the name for the Teton mountains.
And I busted out laughing.😆
I had no idea at all. Call me late to the party. 😆
But hey, you get a bunch of lonely Frenchmen out there trapping without their lady friends, and pretty soon, I guess mountains… well… yeah.
😆
I’ll might not ever be able to hear the name of that mountain range again without remembering what the French word actually means.
It still makes me laugh. 🙃
After passing through a bunch of little Idahoan towns on the west side of the Tetons, we started up the pass as though we were going to go all the way to Jackson, but I realized that there weren’t any good camping spots on the other side of the pass, so we turned around, headed back down the pass almost Back to the border with Idaho, and found a lovely little campground to spend the night at.
And that was the day! The Tetons are absolutely gorgeous, despite having potentially ruined my ability to think of them without chuckling in the future. 🙃
Loves & hugs.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 