This is a fantastic place to visit! The Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center is in West Yellowstone, Montana, near the border of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. It’s a non-profit, wildlife rehabilitation and education center specializing in grizzly bears and gray wolves. All the animals at the center were rescued: nuisance bears that would have been killed or wolves born in captivity at other facilities that could not care for them.
The animals are rotated through large enclosures where they can be seen by the public and are given frequent stimulation by hiding food or bones, rearranging habitat features, planting unusual scents for them to discover, stocking trout in the ponds and streams, etc.
Short video of some of the animals at the Discovery Center.
Highlights from the Idaho portion of our summer road trip to Yellowstone:
We stayed several days in Boise: biking through town and up on some of the trails above the city, floated the Boise River through town, successfully solved (and escaped) the house in Boise Escape and made a side trip to historic Idaho City. After Boise, we visited the World Center for Birds of Prey, stopped off at Three Island Crossing (Oregon Trail crossing of the Snake River) and camped overnight at Craters of the Moon National Monument. After exploring the lava formations we continued on to Idaho Falls, stopping off for a tour of the world’s first nuclear power plant, Experimental Breeder Reactor #1. Our final leg included the Mesa Falls Scenic Byway and camping near West Yellowstone.
Pan had developed a habit of lying in wait on the upstairs deck early every morning, in a perfect spot for an unsuspecting bird to alight nearby on the wall. It was unfortunately a reasonably successful strategy, so I decided to try one of those plastic owls to ward off the birds. Pan and Hera’s different reactions to first seeing it was amusing:
Pan and Hera meet the Guardian Owl (60 seconds, 20 MB)
And yes, the guardian owl has been effective. It’s been well over a year (I’m backdating this post) and almost every bird has stayed away from the deck but Pan continued to go out before dawn every morning for most of a year, oblivious to why the birds stopped coming. All except this one little guy who came along many months later. He was apparently too smart for his own good and not fooled by the plastic owl. He even seemed to taunt Pan through the window over the course of a week or two. However, I’m guessing this is also that same bird that Pan eventually caught a little later.
Darlene and I visited the fantastic National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada (“The Harrah Collection”) recently. This is a cool place and definitely worth a trip to visit, even for non-car aficionados. It’s super-easy to get caught up and lose several hours in this place checking out the hundreds of vintage vehicles. It’s fun to see and learn how things evolved so haphazardly from the original notions of the “horseless carriage”. It’s quite an amazing collection and full of surprises.
I recently discovered this online, collaborative catalog of “wondrous and curious places”, The Atlas Obscura. It’s a great source to find odd things to see and explore both near home and afar. Browsing the listings, I found plenty of little local surprises in addition to the places I had already seen or been. Check it out in your own area or the next time you’re traveling somewhere!
The first one Darlene and I ended up checking out was The Statues of Ken Fox in Auburn. I’d seen the giant sculpture of a gold-panning prospector along Interstate 80 in Auburn, but I wasn’t aware of the artist/dentist’s other, similarly massive creations in town. Here’s a more complete backstory on Ken Fox and his creations.
We also went hiking around the intersection of several historic routes (wagon, train and automobile) in the Sierra Nevada, at Donner Summit: the first wagon trail to California, first transcontinental railroad, first transcontinental highway.
While visiting with Darlene’s family in Wisconsin/Minnesota, we went for a Segway ride and tour in La Crosse this past Sunday with Shel, Dan, Kathy and Shelly. It was my first time trying one and it was a lot of fun. The handling is very intuitive and responsive – to the point of being a little addictive! If you have yet to try one, look for a tour or rental in your area (like La Crosse Segway Tours) – it’s definitely worth it!
Click through for the full gallery of pics and video:
A short, 75-second video montage from our Segway ride in La Crosse, WI.
A little while ago, after reading “Ready Player One” again (Spielberg is making a movie!) and after seeing a couple of tech talks by old Atari game programmers, I was lamenting that I sold my old Atari VCS so many years ago. Well, Darlene jumped on this comment, found a bundle someone was selling on eBay and surprised me with an early birthday gift. Yup, an old Atari VCS/2600 (four switch version), a set of controllers and a bundle of game cartridges. Sweet! (I think my brother and I actually had the six-switch, Sears-rebranded version, but still very cool!) Thanks, Darlene!
I immediately had to go fill out the set of 40 cartridges with a couple of other games I remember us playing a lot. Of course then was the challenge of hooking it up: the Atari outputs an analog RF TV signal… on an RCA-plug cable. You can use an adapter like this one to go from RCA plug to coax TV cable input. I don’t have a TV tuner, so rather than pulling a VCR out of a box in a closet, I hooked it up via my old USB EyeTV tuner/video converter to my MacBook – success!
Yeah, you can play any of these games via emulation on a modern computer, or even a smartphone/iPad, but there’s something very different about jamming the physical cartridge into the old physical console and handling that classic Atari joystick. (And having to use cotton swabs and alcohol to clean the contacts on all of the Activision cartridges to get them to work again!)
It’s been fun to pick these up and rediscover old visual/procedural memories, like the admittedly-simple path through the Adventure maze. Some titles are only vaguely familiar until you plug them in and see the game again and then go “aha!!”
So… to paraphrase Atari’s old marketing… have you played your Atari today?
