Chipmunks and Mule Deer and Bears, Oh My.

Remember I had mentioned something about a family vacation.  Then I said I would blog about it.  Then you didn't see me for over a month.  I'm not going to share the post that has been mostly written and waiting to be shared.  

Our family went on vacation to the Mammoth Lakes and then into Yosemite National Park.  The girls loved every moment of it from playing in the dirt all day, not having to take a bath, and keeping all our food in a Bear Box.  The worst part of the trip had to be the car.  There is only so much being in a carseat that a kid can take, even with the number of stops we made.  Traveling that far with a child LG's age took a lot of patience from everyone.   

One of the fun things about traveling around this part of the country is all of the wildlife that we saw.  Like this like guy.  A chipmunk that hung around our campsite looking for food scraps.  Poor little guys have to work hard because no one leaves food out.  That and the $5,000 fine if you get caught feeding the animals and more importantly, the bears go where the food is.  I wonder how well that is enforced the law against feeding animals?  I liked that one place discouraged throwing scraps by posting that mountain lions liked to hunt were well-feed, fat squirrels and raccoons lived.

The little bugger is so darn cute.  Way better than the nasty LA squirrels but is in competition with the bunnies that come into our backyard everyday.

There were also deer.  Lots and lots of deer.  Like it was deer spotting season.  They weren't afraid of the people either. Not even slightly.  This is about as close to one that I was willing to get.  You never know when a deer might snap.  I kept getting these images in my head of crazy, stuffed deers with their beady eyes charging at me while yelling at me like a drowning elephant.  Weird, huh?  Okay you're right, I have no idea what a drowning elephant sounds like, but I think I've seen The Great Outdoors too many times.

Then there were the bears.  This was the first one that we saw and the best pictures, too.  He couldn't of been 50 feet off the road.  If you are ever driving to Yosemite and there are suddenly stopped cars everywhere, chances are it's because of a bear.

This guy was walking around and then decided to climb a tree.  Note to self, don't climb a tree to run away from a bear.  He was fast.  He got up to the branch in about three seconds.  The really high branch.

Here is a look at how tall the tree is.  You can see a patch of the road in the bottom right corner. 

We came across one more stopped cars bear sighting on the way home.  The Momma bear was in a field far off the road and had two cubs with her.  We had been there for only a couple of minutes when she started heading back into the woods.  The ranger announced that the bear was gone and for us to get in the car.   BG then politely pointed out to him that the bear is "right there."  I explained that he meant she was leaving and we should too.

We did not see any bears while we were camping.  I did learn from some Mammoth regulars that the site we picked to camp was heavily bear infested.  And they were aggressive to get the food.  One year our regular Camper Guy had walk five feet from the bear box and turned around to find a bear in it.  Another year, a mom had put out her kids' lunch, grabbed her kids from a few feet away and bear cubs had already taken off with the juice boxes.

Camper Guy speculated that we missed the bear because we were camping the first week the site had been opened.  The bears hadn't made there way down the mountain yet.  Or that Momma Bear had been relocated because Camper Guy had been seeing the same bear for three years and she was getting too aggressive.

One one animal that we didn't see at all....  fish.