Scenes from day 5 of Summer Vacation 2010

Tuesday, August 3rd, was an Explore-West-Yellowstone-day for us. The morning started out with an unplanned surprise. I went for an early morning trail run {literally a dirt hiking trail through the forest}, which was absolutely quiet, beautiful and very, very cold. And when I say very cold, I mean cold, as in see.your.breath.34.degrees.cold. The surprise was when two large black dogs came charging at me, barking and snarling out in the middle of no-where. I froze and shouted "NO!" in my lowest-loudest voice, fighting every instinct to just scream and run for my life. The dogs ran right up to me, the larger of the two had a happy tail, but the smaller one was growling and did not look at all friendly. I shouted "NO!" a couple more times, one of the dogs sniffed my leg and then they both ran off. I never saw any owner, but they both had collars. Those dogs definitely scared the puddin' out of me, but glad it wasn't a bear or wolves. I felt so defenseless standing in just my t-shirt and shorts. Probably not my best idea to be where I was, but the draw of the wilderness was pretty strong.

After a leisurely breakfast, we rode our bikes to the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center downtown. We all fell in love with Jewel, a Karelian Bear dog, who is part of the bear management team. It was a great learning experience.
After lunch we biked downtown to snoop around a do a little souvenir shopping. After a lot of looking, we each picked out a t-shirt.

Steve's shirt gave a nod to the whitewater rafting as well as his accident-prone character.

My t-shirt was directly inspired by the dog incident earlier that morning and gave a nod to my slightly competitive nature.

The girls had a great time in one of the shops which had a ton of different hats. {I know what you are thinking and I can totally understand. I tried really, really hard not to think of how many other people had also done the same thing.}

I took pictures of the painted buffalo scattered throughout town. The creativity and designs were amazing.

A few other items we did on day 5:

• We went to the IMAX theater and watched a movie about the history of Yellowstone.
• After an afternoon rainstorm, we went back to the Grizzly and Wolf Center and enjoyed the animals as they were much more active after it had cooled off.
  
• Steve grilled buffalo burgers for supper - Delicious!
• After supper, we walked back downtown for Kippy to get her much anticipated Huckelberry ice cream, while the rest of us were treated to fresh peaches & vanilla ice cream at my parent's camper. My favorite!
• It was a very relaxing day.