Yellowstone adventure, day five. So, we actually made it into the park today. There’s still knee-deep snow covering the ground in some places. The landscape here is even more amazing than before, and the park is so big it would take several hours just to drive through the whole thing. The first thing you see through the entrance is Yellowstone Lake, which is really more like a small sea. You can barely see the other side, and the entire thing is still covered in ice. We drove around and stopped to see a lot of the scenery, but the first real thing we did was see the sulfur springs. Some of them just bubbled a little, some just spit out steam like pipes in a factory, some churned violently enough to make small waves on the shore of the ponds they were in. My favorite was called Dragon’s Mouth, I think. The spring was inside of a cave. Steam poured out of the mouth of the cave, and the echoes of the water hitting the cave walls made a sort of roaring sound. A small waterfall ran down the hill and fed the pool, too.

We saw several overlooks to Lower Falls, but what was really impressive was the canyon that the falls ran into. Me and my mom hiked to a peak on one side of the canyon, where we could see the whole thing. It was another issue of such massive space that you don’t know how to handle it. It is probably two or three miles directly to the other side, and even farther to other points you could see. The other side is a huge rock face that is colored in various shades of orange, pink, red and yellow, with a few brave pine trees growing in clefts in the rock.

Another neat part of the park that everyone goes to see is the wildlife. Today we saw two bears, a few buffaloes, a herd of mountain goats, lots of mule deer, and a chipmunk.

Reflections for the day- Everyone seems to be tense and stressed, even though this is supposed to be vacation. Not when we’re seeing the landmarks, of course, but when we’re back in the RV for an extended period of time or things in the schedule don’t work out. I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t been much of an exception to this, but I can’t leave that fact out. Everyone is exhausted from traveling over the last four days, and that is understandable, but come on, it’s vacation! My parents, both workers in elementary schools, have had so many new standards and regulations shoved down their throat in the past couple of years that the workload consumes them, even when they’re home. I’ve been so busy with school the last couple of semesters that I’ve about run myself into the ground, too. What this boils down to is that, even though we left our work in Tennessee, it’s like we don’t know how to not be stressed. As Americans, we’ve been conditioned to have tunnel vision for X, Y or Z, and it’s hard to take our eyes off of that thing. To me, it seems that the most evident part of this is that we are the most blessed people in the world but we completely ignore the one of five people in the world that live on less that $1.25 per day, or the four out of five that live on less than $10 per day. Thirty-thousand children die every day from starvation or preventable disease, and it wouldn’t take anything but pocket change for Americans to fix that. But we have become focused on our own desires to the point of selfishness. Getting the college degree, buying more stuff, going to the movies or a concert, or impressing that one girl or guy has consumed our time and money, and will ultimately only leave us wanting more. Don’t even get me started on how we should be using those resources to further the message of the Gospel and God’s Kingdom (but instead squander them on ephemeral things). Looking outside of the American box and realizing that the world is huge, diverse, in need and (shockingly) not about you, presents us with a choice: to radically change the way we live to serve the least of these, or continue to live out our daily lives unchanged, as if we never looked outside of the box in the first place.