Cruising down the river

Today we attended orientation to Xanterra, safety procedures and then housekeeping information.  All in all we were in class about 4 hours.  After lunch we were able to "shadow" Room Attendents and help stock service carts and count clean linens.  We have met some really great kids.  There are a lot of Eastern Europeans working the park this year, but in our little village there seem to be a lot from Taiwan.  Also, 5 new hires came in from Equador yesterday to work in Grant Village.  We all attended orientation together today.  They have so many questions about the US - very nice kids.  They are here until October like we are.  After dinner we decided that it would be fun to drive around to Fishing Bridge, which is about 20 miles from where we are staying,  to see if there was a "hatch" going on and if there were any huge Cutthroat trout  to be seen.  We have so many mospquitoes we thought maybe there would be a lot of trout flies hatching, too.  We parked our car and starting walking over the bridge - saw a few caddis flies but no trout.  There was a crowd of people gathering on the other side of the bridge and a Ranger was with them.  We thought maybe he was holding a Ranger Tour and just sort of wandered on up to the crowd.  Well, were we surprised to find out there was a grizzly about 300 yards away on a penisula out from the side of the Yellowstone River.  We didn't have our binoculars with us and even if we had we would have had to use our imagination to "see" him.  We had been talking with the Ranger and Bud decided to go get the car and bring it to where I was on the bridge.  The Ranger received a call about that time that the bear was on the west side of the river and Bud stopped in his tracks for us to follow the Ranger to see the bear.  The bear decided to take a swim and started floating down the Yellowstone River right to where we were standing on the bridge.  He swam right under the bridge where we were - not 10 feet away.  It was a sight and we caught it all on the camera.

He started out on one side of the river and then treaded water for a few seconds.  This gave me time to catch up to him with the camera.  The first picture shows him on the right side of the bridge,  a little distance away from us.  Then the pictures progress to him swimming a little distancce  and then getting out to head to higher ground.

                                           OUR BEAUTIFUL DRIVE BACK TO THE CABIN