Senior Class Trip

My senior class, minus one member (or a quarter of us, if you prefer), just took a trip to Yellowstone. As I write, my tent is drying in the yard. You might expect that getting rained on would have spoiled the adventure - who likes camping in the rain? Yet, the trip was one of the sweetest camps I have ever done, and easily my most favorite trip to Yellowstone. Mark, Kimberlee and I were chaperoned by Petra's own Miss K.
Here's a quick run-down of what went down:

Monday morning, we woke up early and tried to leave by 7, but it was more like 7:30 by the time half of us got coffee. We drove through the beautiful Gallatin canyon, reached the Madison campground (laughing at the civilization and the BCTE (Best Campground Toilet Ever)) and set up our tents. We ate lunch, and I was adventurous enough to put mustard on my sandwich, which I had never done before. We drove out and arrived at a waterfall that our escort, Miss K, had always wanted to hike to. (It's not the upper or lower Yellowstone falls, I don't know the name). Problem was, there was no trail - wait, no problem. We parked at the tourist look-out but hopped off the roadbed and started slip-sliding a few hundred feet. The river was high and the waterfall gorgeous. The trek up was not too bad, though very loose. (SKL1 :)

From here on, everything is jumbled together in my mind- we had some many different adventures. I will give a rough approximation of what happened.
We hiked to Ice Lake through a mile of snow and slushy mud; the lake was still partially covered in ice. We looked in the water and listened to the ice melt as we rested (SKL2). On the way back, Mark and I decided to walk only on logs because the trail was so wet. We managed it, and had a blast. The huge number of dead trees in Yellowstone enabled such a crazy thing as not touching the ground for a mile. We got back to camp too early to eat dinner, so we took a walk around some buffalo, passing Mark's frisbee all the way. We watched the sunset and listened to some coyotes (and a wolf?) howl. At night, we ate tortellini with red sauce (fancy food, and a lot of it was a theme for this trip); then built a fire and toasted some marshmallows. Oh yea, we had to postpone cooking because some buffalo wandered through camp - we played hearts in the boy's tent in the meantime. We collapsed in bed late, and I couldn't have imagined a better day.

Tuesday topped Monday by a mile, however. We left camp and came upon a traffic jam watching a grizzly bear and cub, so we helped out. It was really cool - the bear was huge and we were able to get safely close enough to snap some pictures with Miss K's amazing camera. Next, we tried to climb Mt. Washburn, which I had done before, but the trailhead parking lot was blocked off because there was five feet of snow on the trail. As the snow was hard enough to walk on top of, we were almost going to go ahead with the hike until we decided that sledding would be more fun. We got a tarp out of Miss K's Subaru (which was packed so full that we should have taken pictures for Subaru to use in their commercials) and hiked a little ways up the trail to a huge slope. We sat in a line on the tarp and used it like a toboggan. It went really fast, the slope was steep and long; we always ended up in a confused jumble at the bottom. After two runs, we piled back in the car and warmed up. Sometime later, we drove around, ate lunch (I was adventurous enough to put mayo on my sandwich, which I had never done before), and stopped to look at some mud holes. The trip was very relaxed; whatever we wanted to do we went and did. We would drive by something and say "Hey, o lay! oy vey! let's go look at that!" and we would. So, we chilled to Jack Johnson and James Taylor and U2 and wandered up to the fishing bridge, then took the long way back to camp. We had used up a lot of the wood that Miss K had brought, so we went on a huge wood-gathering expedition. Mark and I did he-man things like smash logs apart by throwing them at other trees or dropping them from heights. Also, Mark fell in a bog as he was walking through a marshy area trying to reach a tree. He hit a soft spot and his leg fell deep in the bog, covering his shorts and leg with mud past his knee. He managed to do twice, once with each leg, so it looked kindof funny. :) For dinner we cooked hamburgers and hot dogs over the fire; they tasted superb. Then, it started raining so we went inside the tent again and played hearts (I lost big time). Miss K threw marshmallows to Mark and Kimberlee, who tried to catch them in their mouths. Mark got one in about fifty tries, and Kimberlee did it the first time. =P I was exhausted and slept OK, though it rained through a lot of the night.

In the morning, the girls got up and started cooking breakfast in the back of Miss K's crazy versatile Subaru. The hatch opened and made a covering about two feet out, so that you could stand behind the Subaru and use the stove sitting in the trunk. They were huddled there making chocolate chip pancakes. Kimberlee grudgingly brought Mark and I breakfast in bed, but we felt bad and got up quickly to have round two under the Subaru hatch. We were all crammed in a space about five feet long and two feet wide and six feet tall; it was so packed that the taller members of our group had to step out into the rain to lean back and take a drink. The rain, thankfully, diminished as we packed up the tents and put all our gear back into the Subaru. Almost as soon as we left, we ran into a group of parked cars, which in Yellowstone means some wildlife is nearby. We spotted a huge black shape feeding down by the river on a carcass and at first thought it was a bear, but when it turned we saw a long tail and realized that it was a wolf. Mark shot almost an entire roll of film on this guy; it was incredible. Eventually it left the carcass and crossed the road below where all the people had stopped. Unable to believe how lucky we were at the wildlife we saw, we continued driving and hit another jam. This time, it was a moose and calf down in a wet area. I had never seen all the these big species at once in Yellowstone. After another roll of film, we decided to do a hike by a river that we had seen earlier. It started out flat but climbed 500 feet to a geothermal area. There were only two other people up there, which was nice for a change. We climbed on a rock formation and took a break on top of ground warmed by the thermals. It hailed a little on us as we hiked down but was nice again by the time we got to the car. We ate lunch at a spot by the river and drove to Mamoth Hot Springs, and by this time I was adventurous enough to put pickles on my sandwich too - it was wonderful. Miss K rallied her Subaru through the one-way observation road (there was no one there); it was pretty sweet, just like a roller coaster. On the way out, we saw big horn sheep on the cliffs right before West Yellowstone to round out the animal watching. We drove back through Paradise Valley; I napped a little. When I got home, we had company over for dinner and then I rushed off to a Farewell June concert with my brothers. I was pretty tired...
Yea, then the next day I did highway cleanup on I-90 with Petra people. I was even more tired, but I'm good now. what craziness :)

For further reading, please see another take on the trip, by kimberlee. She captures better the emotion of the adventure:
"Most senior trips contain a visit to an amusement park, or something similar. My senior trip was a camping trip to Yellowstone National Park, and I honestly think it was the best senior trip I could ever hope for (except Chelsea couldn't make it. Her presence would have made it the best). Most of you have already heard about the ridiculous adventures that made this trip unique (such as, for example, carrying a plastic flamingo around with us, tobogganing down a snowfield on a sheet of plastic, Mark falling into a bog, the bear and moose and wolf sightings, the Frisbees and meals and scrambling around on lesser-known trails, me nearly plunging headfirst into a crazy cold mountain lake...), but I can tell you that what made this trip so special cannot be put in words. We laughed together and some of us cried together, and we all realized how very much we have shared, how well we know each other, how much we mean to each other, and how much we enjoy each others' company. This is my shout out to the most wonderful classmates and craziest chaperon EVER!
Thank you all for a trip I will never forget. "