Proceeding down the road a bit, we saw some beautiful antelope which were running in a small herd alongside the road. What beautiful and majestic animals. They are so graceful and delicate looking. We were surely fortunate to have an opportunity to catch them while running so close to the road. Later on in our trip through Custer a single male antelope moved from quite a distance away to only about 10 feet from our car! I was able to grab a wonderful photo of that male.

We also had a chance to see some of the more entertaining animals in the park – the burros! What funny animals. They are larger than donkeys but smaller than horses. While I do not know what specifically distinguishes a burro from a donkey/horse, they are quite similar in stature and form. Once again, they were as funny as I recalled from previous trips. It was particularly exciting to see Krista’s response to them – since it was an entirely new experience. The burros are ‘wild’ and roam freely (within certain certain park parameters). However, it seems like they are intelligent enough to know where to get a free meal. Rather than graze on the abundant grasses everywhere around them, they choose to almost block the road so that you are forced to stop- led to open your window – and subsequently give them something to eat. Now that I think about it, it is probably forbidden to feed any of the wild animals, but, as you can see from the picture, when they stick their entire heads through your car window, it is difficult to ‘say’ no. We proceeded to feed them some of our finer snacks – I believe that we fed them some nutragrain (?) wholegrain chips. Those burros eat better than we did…my bag of skittles did not seem to be appropriate to give to those animals.