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!