Into the Lion's Den!

Well, I have more pictures than I can keep track of, but these are the ones I want to post for my most recent adventure! Yesterday, Thursday July 14, 2011, I was able to go to the North Unit of the park with a few buddies and take a nice long day hike. We had planned to follow a trail but as you know, I tend to want to explore the unexplored haha. Sooooo we began down the trail and saw a butte that needed to be climbed. The NU of the park is much more drastic than the SU, the buttes are much steeper and much much higer haha. Either way we managed to climb to the top of this first butte and enjoyed the hell out of it! I had a ton of fun. The reason I named this post "Into the Lion's Den" is because the NU has a resident population of mountain lions, maybe up to five! Which for this small park that is pretty large. We stumbled across what seemed to be the remains of a cougar kill and as we continued up the side of a butte, our goal was to explore some caves we had seen, we found what looked to be some old mountain lion scat. No fresh prints or fresh scat but we were definitely in its territory! Kind of scary! Either way enjoy these pictures there are quite a few!

Talk about an awesome find! I have no idea what it is.

A creature from the depths!

Well after repelling down into the sink hole I had to climb out!

This was the hole I squeezed through to get out of the sink hole that I repelled into haha

CAVE!

Mountain lion kill?

Well....you know.

A big ole sink hole haha

I had too

Awesome geology

Don't worry no one fell...to far.

Petrified Wood!

More petrified wood!

I thought it was cool how the trees followed the river flood zone haha.

We hiked all the way down this butte to the next one! It was pretty intense!

A curious looking rock. Not sure what kind of crystals...?

Milkweed if i am correct?

Thought these sediment lines looked really cool!

This was the last "hill" we had to climb!...it was a pain in the ass!

Featured Ranger!

I posted the link below for anyone who is interested, I was the featured ranger this month for the National Historical Society that is partners with our park. They are the ones who run the visitor center's store. If you want to check it out click on the link and it should bring you to their website where you just have to click on the picture of the newsletter! I was pretty excited about it...sooooo check it out!! =)))


http://trnha.org/Newsletters.html

Independence Day!!

Well I worked all day on the 4th but I was able to participate in the potluck that we had later that evening, I made some really good pasta with red sauce. It had mushrooms, sausage, onions, and fresh tomatoes in it. It was realllllyyyyyyyyy good! The town of Medora was having fireworks later that night so me and two other guys climbed to the top of the mountain behind town to watch the fireworks. We definitely didn't do this with a few beers in us or at 10:30 at night...hahahah you know me. Anyway we made it to the top and yes it was very steep and very dark, in other words it was frickin' awesome! We walked along the ridge line to a spot that we determined to be as close to where the fireworks would be as possible...and we were right haha. They were launching the fireworks off a few hundred feet below us in a grassy area in the town and they were exploding right in front of us. Don't worry mom we were well out of their blast zone, I promise. Either way it was a blast and I was able to get some cool video. As a disclaimer please just ignore what is being said in the background, there may or may not be a few foul words haha. We couldn't help ourselves. Also I was taking video the entire time and my camera ran out of memory right before the finale =(( sooo I took some video on my phone and the finale was awesome, however when it was over instead of clicking the damn save button I hit end and it deleted my video...that was a big =( Either way here is what I got hope it works!

Picture kind of sucks but you get the idea, we were on top of the world!!

This is what we were climbing on haha...

That is the Yoda rock, and we had to climb up him to get where we were....that was a task, good thing I brought rope haha.

again, kind of a bad picture but you get the idea. this is the town from the ridge we were on....this isn't the top yet haha.

Another day in the park

On Saturday July 2, I was able to rove around in the park all day, it was a ton of fun because I got to hike all over and I was in full uniform so people stopped and talked to me, and took pictures with me too! haha I had a blast. I am posting a few (by a few I mean a lot) of the pictures I took on the hike. Keep in mind that a lot of these pictures may look similar to the older posts, this is because they probably are of the same locations or close to it. I pretty much just take a ton of pictures and load them on my computer and chose my favorites to share soooo some of them may seem a little repetitive but I think they look cool so you will just have to deal with it haha. Also there are a lot of wildflower pictures because I am helping another ranger compile pictures of flowers in the park, like a local park flower guide....unfortunately I do not know the name of several of them...haha. Enjoy!

I like this one a lot because it is a prickly pear cactus, but the cool thing is the bee getting pollen!

The mariposa Lily is one of my favorites so far, they are very beautiful and these pictures only do them so much justice. 

I had to throw in a few scenic shots too! lol

I like the contrast of this one, sunny vs cloudy/rainy skies

No I was not driving, I stopped the car to take the picture I promise haha

Yes you have seen this before, but I can't help but go back to the Wind Canyon cus it is super awesome there. sorry

yep, another mariposa lily

Some horses just chillin' on a butte.

Hope you enjoyed the pics!