Grand Teton - September 1st.

So now that it is September, it is time for us to have more of a “schedule”, which includes specific work time for Dave.  Vacation mode is great, but we need to start pacing ourselves.

So today our plan was to go to Jenny Lake.  First we got distracted by a couple of moose in the campground basically across the camp road from our site.  After all of these years of traveling and national parks I finally got to see my first moose!!!   We had a good time watching them “play”.   They were in a tent site and there still was a person in the tent.  The moose were active with each other.  When one walked away, the person in the tent started shaking the tent.  That got the attention of the one that was still by the tent and he was smelling the tent and pushing on it.  Always be super quiet and act like you are not there.

After the moose moved on, Dave did some work, so we didn’t head out until about 11am.  Well, the parking lot was full and there were cars parked on the side of the road for over a mile.  Too crowded in our opinion to enjoy the peacefulness of the surroundings.  We also tried  another trail area that I thought might be less crowded.  You couldn’t see the lot from the road and no one was parked on the road, so thought we stood a chance.  That was incorrect.  It took us about 20 minutes to ride through all the parked cars and be able to turn around. 

So, we went back to the campground, took a walk near the river and enjoyed the scenery and a bit of relaxation.

There was a ranger talk about wolves in the evening, so we went and enjoyed that.

Fun wolf facts:

1. Wolves get a bad reputation from stories like Little Red Riding Hood, the 3 Little Pigs, Peter Wolf, etc.
2. Wolves can jump over 12 ft high and 17ft “long jump” and can run as fast as 40mph.
3. They have 18 toes and very sharp claws
4. They live in packs of 4-10 wolves, however there is a documented pack of 37 wolves
5. Average territory of a pack is 50-1,000 miles. 
6. Wolves have a hierarchy within the pack.  The top male and female are the only ones who have pups.  Gestation is 62 days, they have 4-6 pups which weigh 1 lb, hairless and blind when born, but have a sense of smell 100 times that of a human.
7. Wolves initially feed their babies like birds, chew it and give it to them. At 5 weeks old the pups have teeth and eat meat.
8. Wolves eat deer, elk, bison, moose.  They go after the sick, old and young.  
9. 40 wolves live in Grand Teton and 124 live in Yellowstone (not much of a difference considering the difference in size of the parks. 
10. The ranger talked about the history of the wolf.  My summation is this: 
1. they started as an animal living in harmony with the indigenous people.  In fact the indigenous people admired their hierarchy and hunting prowess.  When the indigenous did kill the animal, they used all of it.  Their skin/fur were considered honorable and were worn by leaders of the tribe
2. When people started farming the area and living here they were afraid of the wolves and the wolves would kill their livestock, so they didn’t want the around and would kill them and hire bounty hunters to kill them as well.
3. The saddest fact was that in 1926 the last known pack of wolves in Yellowstone were killed by park rangers because at that time that is what was thought to be best.
4. One thing that was realized is without wolves, the hoofed animal population grew and grew and hurt the land due to all they ate.  
5. 1974 wolves were put on endangered species list.  1987 experimental population of wolves approved for yellowstone. 1995 wolves actually reintroduced in yellowstone and they found how much they helped the ecosystem.  2014 off the endangered species list.

Til next time…