Marilyn Bohn | Creative Organizer

We went to Jackson Hole Wyoming a week ago and had some great times. We saw a large heard of buffalo, a female moose standing in the small river eating, later a huge male moose thrashing about eating, trumpeter swans, and a bear.

It is the bear I want to talk about. I didn’t know Grand Teton National Park is bear country. And I mean that literally. We tent camp and we had to move everything from our camp site to our car if we were to ever leave it. We put up with that cheerfully but it was a few other events that drove us away.

On the second night we laid awake as the rain pelted our tarps, I didn’t realize how loud that could be. I counted the seconds between the thunder and lightening to see how many miles away the lightening was. It got as close as 10 miles. In the morning it was still raining hard so we went into Jackson Hole and had a delightful day.

When we got back to our camp there was a note from a ranger telling us a bear had gone through a container we had left (all perfectly legal) that had rope, a hatchet and toilet paper. As we were reading this a loud crash led my daughter to run down to the car and there not far from us was a black bear going from camp to camp. A man across the road came to tell us lightening had struck 200 yards from our camp. (That is why the firemen’s pickup was still there). That was it; we broke camp in the pouring rain and had to go 110 miles to get a motel as all the tent campers it seems were seeking shelter in Jackson.

In spite of it all we had fun in Jackson and at the Scottish Festival.

I was grateful we were well organized. We had put everything in plastic bins and had organized each meal into areas in the bins and cooler. This made it easier to transport from the car to the camp and back constantly. Organizing homes and offices are one thing, but if you are going to camp whether it is in a tent, tent trailer, motor home or trailer being organized makes the experience more fun and pleasant.