Today was a fairly short day of driving in comparison to some of the days we've done. Only a couple of hours to spend on the road today which was nice.
We left Pocatello reasonably early and headed to Rexburg. Just outside of this town there was another drive through animal sanctuary that we'd found a brochure on - Yellowstone Bear World. They had very similar animals to Bearizona but this time the pens were somewhat larger that we drove through and therefore, the animals not so easy to spot. The first time we travelled through we actually didn't even see the two wolves that shared the bear pen.
This place had soooo many black bears! Again, they had new cubs and juveniles as well as the older bears but here you could actually pay to help hand feed the cubs. We were planning on trying to do this but when we got there the time slot was already full (plus it was about $45 per person!) so we decided to pay for the family to go on a 'curator' tour and feed the adult bears instead from the back of a truck.
The curator tour was pretty cool. It was this time around that we saw the new fawns they had out in the deer pen. We also fed a grizzly bear (they had three at the park - dad and two of his cubs) and then made several stops to feed the older black bears. Interestingly the grizzly that came over to be fed and one of the black bears that came to our side of the truck sit up really tall on their backsides like they're begging for the food. The tour guide said they've learnt they get more food this way because they look cuter. Would have to say she's probably right.
Some of the bears were extremely fat! Someone asked if they were indeed too fat which the tour guide said was not the case, they aren't over fed. Pretty sure though that having the opportunity 4 or 5 times a day to eat bread and fruit bagels (that's what we were throwing out for them) is not really an appropriate representation of their diet in the wild.
It was interesting to find out that the place was originally opened as a rescue centre for circus and entertainment bears. Apparently at one time they even had a Coca Cola advertising bear (from before polar bears were used for advertising).
From here we headed up to West Yellowstone, our home for the next two nights. The weather closed in more and more as we got closer but we decided to take our chances and wander, literally, just across the street from our hotel to the Gray Wolf and Grizzly Bear Discovery Centre.
This was a really interesting place, not for profit, though it was much smaller than we had expected it to be. They're currently in the process of extending it quite a bit to put in more exhibits. We did get to see two different wolf "packs" (there were 2 wolfs in each pen - does that constitute a pack??) about 5 different grizzly bears and a variety of raptors, including two bald eagles.
A really cool part of the park was where they showed how bears can be attracted to suburban areas by things that people leave out and to be honest it hadn't ever occurred to me before that having an unfenced vegetable patch would be enticing to a bear. It was also fun to see a small area full of products people have designed with the intention of being bear proof. At the centre they let their bears try to get into them, for a minimum of 90 minutes. If the bears have been unsuccessful after those 90 minutes, the product is officially declared bear proof and can be sold as such. There were lots of very destroyed bins and coolers there.
After leaving the discovery centre we thought we'd take a quick look at a nearby store for souvenirs. Oops. Big mistake. It absolutely started bucketing down while we were in there and there was no sign it was going to ease any time soon. Mad dash back across the parking lot to our hotel and even in that short run we were all drenched!
Found a cool restaurant nearby where I tried some Bison Stroganoff for dinner. Yummmmmm.