22 degrees at 8:00 a.m. / -107 amp-hours cumulative (40 amp-hours used overnight)

We would be leaving the park today but we’ve booked another night. The weather has turned colder now, and we’re expecting some snow overnight. It is starting to feel like winter up here at 7000 feet. Hard to believe it’s just the first day of October. But even though we are over a hundred amp-hours into our battery bank, we still have conservatively 50 more amp-hours to burn before we start to get into our emergency power reserve.

Eric and Sue, being official travel writers, as are Bert & Janie, have obtained a complimentary admission for all of us to the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone. That’s just 14 miles from Madison campground, in the little outpost town at the west entrance of the park.

Since I haven’t seen a grizzly in the wild yet (and perhaps I would rather not), this seemed to be the ideal way to observe them up close and get some good photos. That’s what the travel writers were all hoping for too. Bert is working on an article for a competitor RV magazine and Eric and Sue are working on something as well. All of them need photos of wild creatures to illustrate their writings.

(By the way, traveling with travel writers is the way to go. Every day I am getting amazing tips on places to go and things to do in the northwest. You’ll see some of their tips appearing in our travels in the next few months.)

The Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center is a not a roadside zoo, but a non-profit organization that works with Yellowstone rangers, makers of bear-related products, and other conservation organizations for the protection of wild animals. It’s a great place to stop on your way in or out of Yellowstone National Park’s west entrance. There’s a good visitor center and outside there are habitats with grizzly bears and wolves. The admission is good for two days, so Eleanor and Emma may go back tomorrow.

In the photo, you can see why hanging a bird feeder is not a good idea in bear country. This 1,000-lb male is about to knock this dead tree over in order to get a snack of birdseed. It took him less than a minute to uproot it. Several times a day, the Center puts different bears into the public habitat with hidden snacks, and you can watch as the bears instantly detect the food using only their nose and casually toss aside boulders and stumps to uncover it. It’s absolutely amazing to see how powerful these creatures are. Heck, just a look at their huge front claws is enough to make you never want to encounter a grizzly bear in the wild.

All of the bears here would have been killed if they hadn’t been moved here. They were mostly bears that had become habituated to humans and were raiding trash or killing farm animals. Coming to the Center was their reprieve from being destroyed. As they say, “A fed bear is a dead bear.” Please don’t feed the animals!

We got a guided tour from John, who showed us an exhibit of “bear-proof” trash containers they’ve tested. Testing is easy: just put some food in the container and leave it in the bear habitat. It’s just like those old Samsonite luggage commercials where they put the suitcase in a cage with an ape. Most containers fail the test. It’s humbling to see what the bears can do.

The Center also has a nice exhibit with wolves, and several raptors that for various reasons can’t be returned to the wild. I can’t do justice to it all in a single blog entry, so I’ll just say that the place is worth the price of admission.

Since were in West Yellowstone, where cell phones work, I downloaded 475 emails (377 of which were spam or useless) and resigned myself to going back to work on Tuesday. We picked up a frozen pizza at the local supermarket for dinner and since it was our last night in the park, I decided to splurge on the power budget and watch a DVD on the laptop.

Our solar gain report for the day:

Mostly cloudy. At 4:30 p.m. cumulative amp-hours were -83. 24 amp-hours gained.