Saturday, July 21, 2012 : Tattler Creek Hike

We arrived at Teklanika Campground fairly late the previous night, so we slept in Saturday. After a good rest and a leisurely morning, we set out for the first event of our adventure; a hike up Tattler Creek. It was a short drive, only about 20 minutes. When we arrived at the trailhead the rangers accompanying us gave us their typical safety talk about bears and the like. Although this put a few of us on edge, we all started out on the hike looking forward to the day. A half-hour's hike found us at our first stop, a small spot along a stream where we could all work on our projects. Continuing on, we hiked up along a river. Several stops were made so that people could work on their experiments. After a couple hours we reached the end of the hike and saw the main attraction of the hike; a fossilized dinosaur footprint imprinted in the rock. We spent around half an hour wandering around the site, then headed back. Seeing as we had already made most of the stops along the trail, it only took us about an hour and a half or so to get back to the van. Along the road, a few of us saw a wolf running alongside the road. This was the first and only time we saw a wolf. That night, we got a campfire going and made s'mores and hot dogs. We tried to go to bed earlier than we did the previous night, because we were going to have an earlier start to the day tomorrow. We all went off to our tents happy with what we did that day, as well as looking forward to tomorrow.

--Tyler