Fauna Fest '99!!!


By George

Being the July 4 weekend, some might say that a trip to Yosemite National Park might be a bad idea. Well, I say PHOOEY to that.

P7020239Michele, Leslie, Judith and I managed to avoid the swarms of people most of the time. We stayed a little out of the way at a place called White Wolf, where there are a few cabins and quite a few more tents. Even though it was full and the odd child wandered by, it was pretty nice, and above all, not in the Valley, where everyone else was.

Judith did a fabulous job of picking out-of-the-way places to see (and animals, by chance), like the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, Dog Lake, Sentinel Dome and Taft Point.

We saw:
  • 2 bears!
  • 2 white wolves
  • About 30 deer
  • A huge black beetle
  • a marmot
  • Several scavengy rat things that are apparently gophers or some such
  • Approximately 4,000,000 mosquitoes
  • Dragonflies emerging from their winter coats (Actually, this was amazing - there were thousands of them in various states of emergence. Trouble was, they lived in the same neighbourhood as the mozzies.)
  • White Wolf Staff Members
  • Squirrels

It's a freakin' bear!!!!!!!!!!!!The park only just opened so I think the animals weren't used to such company.

The girls and I saw a bear FOR REAL in THE WILDERNESS (even though we were driving on a road it happened to cross), and I took a photo of that. Today as we were leaving, we nearly had a crash because of sheer traffic anarchy that had occurred as a result of the hordes just doing whatever the hell they wanted on a one-lane, two-way road *just* so they could see a bear.

Well, of course, so did we, and there he is.