A Curious Incident of things that go Bump! in the night

I spent the weekend at Capital Reef with my family camping. It was so fun, so cold, but fun. The camp ground is in an old pioneer orchard in the middle of huge red cliffs.

So the first night we got there and just unpacked the essentials and went straight to be because it was 40 degrees outside. We have always been so safe in the past when it comes to wildlife. The only animals that you see are deer and little quail. We figured the coolers would be safe since they are hard to open and we wouldn't have to lock up our food. . . .well.

I woke up in the middle of the night because it was so hot, so I turned down our heater and was just starting to drift back to sleep when I heard something moving outside. I thought it was just someone walking to the restroom. But then the movement came closer and it seemed like someone was standing right outside of the trailer on my side! Needless to say I was scared. Then I heard something being dragged across the ground, and I thought that if one of my cousins was playing a trick I was going to happily break every bone in their body.

Suddenly the air was rent with horrible growling sounds, howls and viscous spitting. I jumped out of bed, so did my mom, my dad was sound asleep. The fighting continued and I thought that there were no bears in Capital Reef, but what was out there??? Finally dad woke up and got a flashlight and shone it outside, by that time there was nothing there, so dad got up and went outside (in his garments) to check things out. He came back in to say that everything was okay. In the morning we discovered that raccoons had come to camp and tried to steal our cooler. They opened it and ate all of the turkey burger (my lunch) and all of the brownies straight from the pan (that I had made!). We all looked at each other and suddenly remembered the warning we had received that because of the snow in the high mountains the animals would all move down into the valley and campground. We had been warned, but we thought we were safe, and because of it we lost something that we really wanted.

Of course we sat down and wrote our own conference talk about it, then Sister Dibb told about the bridge workers who didn't put on their safety equipment and so were left "hanging" when the bridge collapsed. Nice huh?

Well the story continues. The next day we were very careful about food. That evening we carefully locked up our food in the truck. Dad took all the garbage bags to the dumpster and carefully latched their lids. We had done all we could do and hoped to have a peaceful night. Around three in the morning I was awakened by my father jumping out of bed putting on shoes, grabbing my mom's crutch and then flashlight and streaking out into the darkness (again in garments). He was going to save the day, we could rely on him, he took his job seriously.

Seconds later, dad re-entered the trailer, quietly put the crutch and his shoes away and climbed back into bed. My mom asked what had happened. Dad said that nothing was wrong. It wasn't raccoons. In the morning we discovered that the nightly visitor was my unsuspecting benign cousin Ryan getting something from his cooler. False alarm. So my dad quickly stepped back into the shadows, a trifle embarrassed. But the White Knight rides again.