My Crazy National Park Trip
By Lenore U.

Once upon a time, I left home with my mother and went on a trip to many Northwestern national parks. This meant a lot of camping and braving the great outdoors. I was scared! I knew that tornadoes were not uncommon and we’d be in Bear Country. And then there were the geothermal features of Yellowstone…

We had to take a long and stressful trip into South Dakota. From there, we went to Sioux Falls and Wall Drug (the huge store with everything!). Mount Rushmore was our next stop.

Finally, we went to Mammoth Dig Site. It was so much fun until we were racing to the car. I won the race. My prize? As I rolled down the ramp, I tumbled onto the parking lot and earned a concussion and a trip to urgent care. >:-( Luckily, going out for ice cream helped a lot. I even met a famous archeologist, who gave me his book and even signed it! I felt much better and from there left South Dakota.

We went to a campsite, about a mile or two from Devil’s Tower. Devil’s Tower, millions of years ago, was a volcano. It oozed out sticky lava that plugged its vent, causing the volcano to become extinct, or die out. The lava cooled as the cone of the volcano eroded, leaving the plug standing. Back to topic-we watched Steven Spielburg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then, we visited the tower itself.

The tower is beautiful!

We then stopped in Cody to watch the rodeo, and it was their first night doing it! Fun, fun, fun!

Our very last attraction of the trip was Yellowstone. It is the largest national park in the USA, and for a reason: over half of the world’s geothermal features are in this park, including two-thirds of the world’s geysers! The place reeked of sulfur(which smells of rotten eggs), and we had to stay on the trail to avoid getting cooked by the boiling water. However, the place was beautiful! I was sad to go home, but I was very homesick.