Henrys Lake State Park (by Asher)

Henrys Lake State Park was on Henrys Lake. It had a nice RV campground and good hiking trails.

[Editor's note: Asher is correct to leave out the apostrophe, though it's not clear why there isn't one since the lake is named after one Andrew Henry.]

On the first full day that we were there, after dad finished work, we went to Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. Never heard of it? I hadn't either before I read the book "The Trumpet of the Swan" by E. B. White. It's my favorite book right now, and it made me love trumpeter swans. So when I found out that the place where they migrated to was only an hour's drive from one of the places we were staying, naturally I wanted to go there.

It was only a 20 mile or so drive, but what we didn't know and what we quickly found out was that the roads are mostly gravel, hence the hour it took to drive there. There were tons of birds but to my disappointment we only saw three or four trumpeter swans in the distance and they looked more or less like white dots.

The next day Mom, Caleb, Jordan, and I rented two tandem kayaks. (I should say we checked them out, because they were free.) We stayed along the shore of the lake and we really only saw Canada geese.

After kayaking we drove to Yellowstone West Entrance. 

(This is just a part of Yellowstone, but the whole map is too big to put on here!) 

We drove to Old Faithful, but on the way Caleb spotted a trumpeter swan in the river! We stopped at a conveniently placed pullout on the road, got out, and walked back to where the swan was. It was cool because it was there, but the fact that there is only 27 swans in Yellowstone (in 2019) made it even more amazing! It was standing in the river and was only about 20 feet away.

No, this isn't vignette; it was taken through the binoculars

Old Faithful was cool, but the trumpeter swan was probably my favorite. 

Saturday all of us went to Yellowstone*. We got a park guide called GyPSy for some of the national parks. We call him Parker. Get it? Using Parker, we went north to Mammoth Hot Springs and over to the Northeast Entrance. The north part is known for wildlife. Dad wanted to see elk.

We saw one elk as we were driving home late at night. As we were driving to the north part we stopped by a place called swan lake. We saw a family of trumpeter swans. according to Google, there was 6,249 elk in Yellowstone in 2021. We saw one. And we saw seven trumpeter swans out of 27.

Driving home, we got to see some coyotes and a fox.

The next morning mom and I went to go on a hike. But as we were leaving, mom invited Jordan along. What made it worse was Jordan walked slower than me, and mom matched her speed so I wasn't able to walk next to mom. On the way back (blue on the map) mom and Jordan headed back to the RV (black on the map) while I walked down to the marina. I was walking along the road towards the trail to the RV when I spotted a family of trumpeter swans (red on the map)!

There was the cob and the pen (dad and mom) and four cygnets (kids). I went down to the shore and came pretty close to them. Unfortunately we left that day or I would have spent all day watching them.

*I found this really helpful site called npmaps.com, it has all sorts of maps on national parks. Wooo!