Mammoth Site and Evan's Plunge

EZ had 4 consecutive days off which was rockin', but the 8 out of 10 days that he worked after that are a little bit of a blur. We were able to make it over to Hot Springs on one of his days and we visited the Mammoth Site and Evan's Plunge. The science nerd in me loved seeing the mammoth fossils. They have over 60 individual mammoths buried in this site and are still in the process of uncovering them. We were able to see a paleontologist at work excavating some of the fossils and he even handed the boys a sample of the crystal he had chipped away from around the fossil he was trying to expose. Super cool! There are fun ramps here, so naturally our boys went SPRINTING through the museum and EZ and I didn't get to read as much of the history as we wanted to...life as a toddler parent. This experience was a little pricey in my opinion, but it was worth it. They have a small kids area which seemed to have classes, but we were there too early. The boys still enjoyed digging in the sand.







We headed to Evan's Plunge after the Mammoth Site to go for a swim. It is a very dated swimming pool with 2 fun slides and other activities. M and EZ really loved the set of rings that you could swing across. M never reached it, and EZ never made it all the way across, so they might be headed back to the gym to work on that. We only explored the indoor pool and booked it out of there when a group of 200 showed up and made it feel crowded. This is the only pool I've ever been to that will let you take your 2yo down a huge slide on a mat in a life jacket. X loved it to say the least and we went down over and over. M even tried the straight down drop slide on his mat and in a life jacket and he was hooked. This was a fun experience, but not a place we'll visit again. There wasn't a great play space for X and honestly our apartment pool is pretty comparable. hah! The coolest part was this pool is fed by the local hot spring and it was built back in 1890! Even before then, the Lakota and Cheyenne used it as a cure all for diseases.

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