Things I Want To Remember-Wyatt

  On our road trip so far, these are three places that I want to remember: Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in Arizona, White Sands National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. At the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum we saw lots of animals. My favourite one was the Ocelot, he is about the size of a fully grown coyote and also spotted like a leopard with a really cool fur coat. When we walked in, he was no where to be seen, but once every single person left, he came out and we got to see him from five or six inches away. One of the other animals I enjoyed visiting was the Mountain Lion. He was the biggest cat I have ever seen. I appreciated seeing him because I probably won’t ever get to see one in the wild. The Mountain Lion was super chill, and didn’t care about us at all. He was siting on a rock about two meters away from us, and for a few minutes, he didn’t even look at us. After a while, he got up and walked right towards us and then stopped to look at us. At that point he was about an inch away from me! 

At the museum they even had birds, and my first pick was a Great Horned Owl. He is a night hunter, which means he is the one who eats all your mice and rats. A really cool thing that I learned at this museum was that if you ever listen to birds flying around, you will notice that you can hear their wing beats when they flap. An owl’s wings are quiet because they have different feathers that make them silent. Another really fascinating fact about the Great Horned Owl is that they have seven more bones in their neck then humans do, which makes their neck able to almost spin fully around. I was lucky because I got to see him from about three or four feet away! That was definitely my favourite bird that we got to see at that museum!

We went to this show and tell about repitiles. They showed us a Gila Monster (hee la mon ster). He was orange and black, with a length of about one foot and looked a lot like a lizard. His jaw is so strong. The strength is equivalent to getting your fingers slammed by a car door. To get his venom into you, he has to grind his teeth on your skin. A couple of things people think you should do when you get bit by a venomous reptile, but you should really NOT do are: shave your skin off, try to suck the venom out of your body, and put a tourniquet on once you’ve been bitten.

After we left Arizona we drove to New Mexico. In New Mexico we visited White Sands National Park. The sand is made of gypsum rock that comes from the mountains all around you.  In the park, Gibson and I were jumping off all the gigantic, white, twenty to thirty feet high sand dunes. If you got lucky you could sometimes jump all the way to the bottom. The sand was so cold compared to normal sand. The thing I found was that if you dug a little hole into the ground, the sand was wet but there was no water anywhere close. That was the coldest and whitest sand ever! Goodbye white sand, hello caves.

At Carlsbad Caverns National Park we started off walking down this little path way that took us to the start of the caverns. At first it was super dark, but after a little while I was able to see quite a bit better because my eyes got used to the dark. That cave was the biggest cave that I have ever been in in my entire life! The guy that found this cave was called Jim White.  He discovered this cave because he saw a big camp of bats leaving a cave one day and thought that if there were that many, that it had to be a pretty big cave. When Jim found the cave he dropped a stalk on fire to see how far down it went. It fell about eighty feet into the cave. He made a ladder out of wire and sticks, and he climbed down with one lantern. The cave ended up being 755 feet down at its deepest depth. I liked the caverns because there were so many things to jump off of and parkour on. When you got to the biggest room, The Ballroom, of the cavern, there were quite a few different paths you could take and it had little signs that told you about the history of the place and about how they got to certain spots in the caverns. One spot in the cave was explored by using helium balloons that had a climbing rope tied to them. The helium balloons were used to help get the rope secured near the ceiling. The climbers were successful in the end and were able to explore the cavern near the ceiling. I never thought that we would be doing stuff like this and I hope that we will get to visit some other parks like these again.