Trek to John's Hill

The vacation does get better! After the disaster of day 1, John and I both woke up refreshed and ready to have fun. We went grocery shopping and settled into the house. Then we explored the National Park. Didn't do a lot that first night. Drove up the east side of the park. We stopped and took some pictures before it started raining. Then decided to drive back down instead of going to the Alpine Summit. We did walk around Sprague Lake, where my brothers loved to fish, but don't have any pictures because my freaking camera broke! Luckily John had his so I didn't go without a camera for the rest of the trip, but mine is very dead. I think it got old.





That night we also found gold in the river! We saw all these sparkles so John jumped in and started pulling out rocks. They aren't big pieces of gold, and they could be fools gold, but still we have a lot of rocks with gold flakes in them!

So the next day, we went back to the river and looked around some more. While we ate in the valley John saw a hill he wanted to climb. Only problem was it was on the other side of the river. Now, this is probably more of a stream than a river, but it was deep enough I couldn't just hike across it. So we walked up and down the river trying to find a place to cross. We failed.

The hill we were trying to get to:


So we drove a ways down and decided to just start walking along the river, towards the hill, until we found a place to cross. We eventually did and it felt so so nice to be in the cold water. Then we just had a long walk (1-2 miles?) across the plains. But we made it to the hill, climbed up all the rocks, and then had an amazing view! We decided that we were the first to conqueror the hill, so we named it John's Hill.





On the way back, we took a slightly different route, followed the river more closely rather than walk across the grass. We found bones! Seriously, we're just trekking along and then there's bones at our feet. We're pretty sure they were elk, as that's pretty much the animal (besides prairie dogs) that wander around that area, plus one of the bones still had fur on it. It was pretty crazy stuff.