The kids have really taken an interest in paleontology, mainly because we keep shoving it in their face. Why stop now.

I had intended our stay in Hot Springs to be about, well, the hot springs. There will be plenty of time for that tomorrow, today Mom has found a very cool activity. The Mammoth Site is an active fossil dig site where we will get to see real life paleontologists working to uncover and discover even more fossils in this unique spot. The Mammoth Site was once a warm spring of its own, one so enticing that the largest land animals on earth would wander in for a swim. The problem is, they couldn’t get back out. Over sixty individual mammoth remains have been discovered in the dried out sink hole. The vast majority are focused at one end where the remains have piled up, the pool here must have given the most false hope for escape.

Colombian mammoths are way larger than their more famous Wooly cousins. Colombian Mammoths are huge by comparison and look quite like a giant version of the African Elephants we are accustomed to. Of the 61 skeletons discovered, only three were of the Wooly Mammoth variety. I knew very little about the variety of mammoths before coming here and I feel like the Columbian Mammoth deserves more love. A huge variety of other fossils have been found around the area and so we take in the fun museum, we see working paleontologists actively digging and their researchers sorting through and categorizing the exhumed remains. The children then joined a group of kids their age in a simulated dig site where they worked together to discover and remove some Mammoth and Giant Short Faced Bear fossils.

We take advantage of a farmers market we stumble upon downtown and somehow for the second time this week, we will be dining on Yak Steaks. Seems like a local thing, and it’s very tasty.

In the morning we head off to the hot springs facility in downtown and realize it won’t open for two more hours… so we turn around and park the bus and get in some mini golf at our campground while we wait. Eventually, Everest snorkeled, Fitz went down the slides a hundred times and we all swam together in the big pool and relaxed in the smaller tubs.

That was the last planned day of the entire trip. Now what?