South Dakota Trip - Third Day, Part 2

After finishing up the morning mining and grabbing some quick lunch, we decided to drive through "Bear Country."  This is a fairly large open space zoo/reserve that has a high concentration of animals, and particularly bears, that you can drive your car through with the windows up.  We first saw these two guys off in the distance slowly lumbering about.

Then we realized a lot of these animals get quite up close and personal.  This scrappy guy was just walking down the road next to our car.  At one point, a bear decided to lean up against the car right in front of us and ended up scratching it quite a bit.  It was pretty awesome seeing them so close up, but we had to make sure the doors and windows were on lockdown.  Something tells me that "Grampa T" would love this place and would be openly tossing food out the windows with no regard for safety.  After all, he was known to regularly feed the bears his left-overs (whole pies included) at the river house in Loveland.

Once you drive through the park area, there is a smaller zoo type area that has some open animal enclosures.  The above one is just for baby bears.  We probably watched these guys play for a solid 30 minutes.  They wrestled, bit each other, played tag, and also got themselves into quite precarious positions like this guy above.  We thought for sure that this guy was totally stuck up there.  I am not quite sure how he was even able to balance on that small branch, but he moved around in a tight circle for quite a while, and then about 15 to 20 minutes later, just crawled straight down the trunk.  Quite amazing!

If you look closely you can actually see this golden bear sitting upright like he is on a couch or in an armchair.  He never really moved from this position, and it was hard to tell if he was real or not but eventually his head would move around or he would scratch himself.  It was so strange, but the kids loved it!

We caught this great brotherly shot right before leaving.  Standing in the background is some small antelope or deer thing that was also inside the park in the enclosure with some bison and other small animals.  "Bear country" turned out to be a pretty big hit with everyone!