Last night I said I'd rant a bunch today... but I'm tired and crap so I'll make this rant short. And at the end.

Our flights from Tulsa to Denver and Denver to Jackson Hole (Wyoming) were not delayed, and the sky was surprisingly clear. It was a rather good start IMO. The only strange thing that happened that day was I saw a pair of F16s circling Tulsa National Airport... they patrolled the airport nonstop (and that caused some turbulence for every single plane that took off). We arrived at our condo at approx 9:45 PM in a rented Ford Fusion. I was disappointed when my dad told me I have to be 25 to drive a rental...

The condo was amazing... I wouldn't mind living there. It was three full stories high, had five beds, two wide-screen TVs, and our very own mangy alley-cat to run around aimlessly outside. We ate dinner, went to sleep, all that normal stuff.

On day 2, I rolled out of bed at 6:00 and out of the condo at 6:30. Today was rather uneventful, we just spent the whole day going to all of Yellowstone's geysers / hotsprings / mudpots / fumaroles. Old Faithful wasn't all that good. People describe its "amazing" water spout, but they forget to talk about the tsunami of sulfuric gases that slap you in the face. We did a lot of walking but saw surprisingly little wildlife. The most we saw were a couple of Swallows (birds). Went back to the condo at 7:00. Started reading the beginning of an interesting book, "Deaths in Yellowstone."

On day 3, I flopped out of bed a 6:00 and out of the condo at 6:45. This was by far the best day. We went to a different area of the park than yesterday, and there was tons more wildlife. We saw four bald eagles, plenty of bison, a grizzly bear, some gophers and chipmunks, some golden eagles beating the crap out of a bald eagle despite being half their size, and the best of all, a crow. I became best friends with it, man. We were driving through some place, maybe I'll remember the name later, and stopped by a road and ate lunch, and I saw a crow hopping around on the ground about a hundred yards away. Eventually it hopped closer (don't know why it didn't fly) and I gave it some peanuts. Soon it was snatching the peanuts right out of my hand, and it got close enough for me to poke it. That's the first time I've ever touched a bird. Eventually my dad got impatient and dragged me back into the car.

On Day 4, we did pretty much nothing but hiking all day long. We hiked down an excruciatingly steep cliff that took us down 265(?) feet and very close to Yellowstone Falls. There were other people there too, and two families asked me to take their picture for them, so I did. They made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Afterwards, we were driving off to a new trail went we saw this lump walking down a large hill in the distance, and with binoculars, we quickly realized it was a black bear. We were the first to see it, which is extremely hard to do in Yellowstone, and within a minute, eight other vehicles including RVs had pounced around our car, and everyone ran out to take a picture. I swear, there must be some sort of bear alarm in their heads or something.

Day 5 consisted of more hiking. We went to Mammoth Hot Springs... supposedly a very spectacular place. It sucked. The whole thing was completely DRIED UP. There was a completely different picture on the brochure. That day we saw more eagles and elk and stuff. Finished that one book mentioned earlier...

On day six, we flew back to Denver, then to Tulsa. Nothing really eventful. But there are a few things that caught my attention.

Jackson Hole-Denver Flight:

I wasn't listening to the convo of the people in the seats right in front in the beginning. It was a Mexican man and his child. They said something, and what really caught my attention was when the boy said, "Kinda like the cocaine accident at home?" Made me wonder wtf was said before. The man just patted the boy's head and didn't say anything.

Denver-Tulsa Flight:

From my holy opinion, the plane of Flight 992 needs to get retired. I noticed during flight the wings were much flimsier than they should be. We flew straight through a thunderstorm, which smacked our plane around a lot, but nothing major. But it was the takeoff that really bugged me.



See those pods underneath the wings and braking flaps? There's five of them in the picture. Anyway, during takeoff, the nose was pitched a little higher than it should have been, and those pod things were tilted freakishly close to the ground. I'd estimate about an inch of air between the ground and the plane.

Okay. Rant time.

People in Yellowstone are so goddamn retarded in the ways of parking. Nearly everyone there was so fricken stupid. Their driving habits were spontaneous, everyone had a blatant disregard of pedestrians and bikers, and people payed little to no attention to parking lanes. Those lines on the ground...? Yeah, you put your car between those, not ON THE LINE or HORIZONTAL across them to take up three whole spaces. And on small road stops, the pull-offs of roads like this:



... parking was even worse. They often trapped vehicles in that were parked properly next to the fence so they couldn't get out and had to wait on those dumbasses to take their stupid picture. And when they're finally ready to leave, the morons find out they locked their stupid selves out of their vehicle. And now EVERYBODY has to wait for a ranger to come and help, or a tow truck to traverse mountains and haul off the crappy vehicle. This happened to us; the victim was a large RV. It was like a police roadblock.

My next rant comes from the book I read, "Deaths in Yellowstone." It slashed off park ranger as a potential career for me, because it made me realize how f*cking retarded some people can be. There was this one family who put their 5-year old child on the back of a buffalo, and blamed the park for the boy's death when the the animal threw the child into the air and "gored him to death." The family filed a lawsuit...AND WON. How the f*ck was that the park's fault? Stupid dumbasses should've known a wild animal is not tame. Hence the WILD part of the name. It happened in the 80s-70s, so I can't find a news article on it.

There were about 300 other deaths due to dumbass-ism, including one where a family accidentally drove their Ford into the Yellowstone canyon. The car fell about three hundred feet, where it smashed into a rock and the two people inside were hurled out, straight through the windshield, and fell another 800 feet to their horribly mangled deaths. But they deserved it for driving in an illegal area.

I could go on and on about all the deaths from stupidity I remember from that book, but for the safety of your sanity, I won't. Never again will I consider becoming a park ranger.

Those two pictures are from Google Images. I have yet to upload my pictures, which were taken on my dad's brand-new multi-thousand dollar camera. I'll upload the good ones as soon as possible.