Dr. Grandpa Pringles vol 1.0 June 26 2024

When I was about 12, my grandpa decided to get an RV and take my sister, my aunt (who is 1 year older than me), and his wife on a road trip from Arizona to Canada and back, hitting as many national parks as possible. Some places I can remember at the moment were Yellowstone, Death Valley, Mount St. Helens, this huge crater somewhere, among other places.

When we were visiting Yellowstone National Park, we camped just outside of the park on some land my grandpas friend owns. This was as primitive as you can get. We left the RV at his house and carried everything we needed far into the forest, next to a river in an amazing piece of the planet. Being that he was with women and children, I remember we made a very nice toilet made of logs and what not that was private and also felt much like a toilet. Let’s say we were not in the same headspace as my grandpa. He would wake up with the sun and jump into the stream in his underwear, while we are huddled in our sleeping bags dreading the frozen world outside.

My grandpas friend told us about a cabin on his property that we could use if we wanted to. So the morning after our first night, we were begging to check out the cabin and stay there. We get up at the butt crack of dawn and start our march through miles of forest. Certainly at the time it seemed like miles but I can not be sure. I am sure that we made it to the cabin, however, because I have a vivid image in my head of a decrepit shack full of rats, living and alive, rat poop, trash, and all kinds of fun bedding material. Clearly we were not staying here.

So we have to hike our way all the way back, but my grandpa took us a different direction. He always liked to pretend and mess with us about things, and this was no exception. He kept going on about how we were lost and he couldn’t find his way back. We ended up wandering through a boy scout camp and I was thinking to myself “why arn’t we asking these people directions to the river or something?” but instead we just walked through like a group of weirdos, and in proper fashion for a bunch of wierdos, we received a number of odd looks.

On our walk back, we had the most threatening encounter with an animal I have ever had. We were hiking along and all of a sudden to our right, not too far off, was a huge towering moose as big as a horse or bigger, and he was not happy. He looked like he was ready to charge us. We very carfully kept watching him and moved away as fast as we could. We even saw a family of bears but they were not intimidating at all. Of coarse they were also much farther away but I was amazed at how intense that moose was.

After hours, we are all exhausted and for all we know we are lost. We don’t recognize anything around us and nobody had any faith we were going in the right direction. Well, everyone but grandpa. Right when we were about to give up and wait for the vultures, we magically appeared back at our campsite.

Oh grandpa, we miss you! My grandpa led quite a life.

-Nichollas