Every year my friends and I hike in at least one new National Park. It’s a real nightmare for my mother, who imagines the various ways in which I’ll be mauled by an animal and doesn’t want to “know anything about the trip.”
To be fair, we’ve had a few close calls. In Yellowstone we turned the corner on a trail and were greeted by a bison. If you’ve never seen one directly in your walking path, they’re HUGE. The next 60 seconds passed in slow motion, all of us frozen until the bison slowly meandered away.