Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
As I drove into Yellowstone in the fall of 2007, I stopped to photograph an elk bull that was sleeping in a meadow. As I got back to the car, I noticed this bison bull laying down across the Madison River, its back frosted white by the dirt it must have been wallowing in.
Bison are the easiest of the big mammals to see in most of Yellowstone as they sometimes hang out in large groups near the road. They generally leave people alone but seem so docile that inevitably someone will get too close and end up getting hurt. It’s not so easy to underestimate them on the trails, however, where it’s hard to ignore their size and speed. And of course the horns. You are in their domain and there is no car to retreat to.
This was one of a group of bulls that was coming in my direction on the Storm Point Trail. While you are supposed to stay on the trails in Yellowstone, I decided to let the bulls have the right-of-way and stepped into the meadow. However, they soon veered off the trail themselves to go for a romp in the wallows so I was able to safely continue down the trail.
After a wonderful week of hiking in Wyoming in October 2005, in the last few hours of my last day I decided to take quick jaunts part way down three Yellowstone trails new to me, to get a taste for future visits. I planned an hour for each trail but when I reached the designated time on the the first trail, the Rescue Creek Trail, I wasn’t ready to turn back so I continued on at the cost of only having time to sample one more trail before sunset.
Having reached the new turnaround time, I stopped to drink in the dry landscape and some water. Strange looking trees down the hill caught my eye so I raised my camera for a closer look. The telephoto lens turned my strange trees into six bighorn rams of various ages.
I never made it to any other trails, I spent the remaining hours watching the rams until they wandered up the trail in the opposite direction and I headed back to the car to start the long journey home. One of my all time favorite hiking moments.
A white-spotted elk calf looks up in the early morning light at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park.
A mother nuzzles its white-spotted calf at sunrise near Mammoth Hot Springs at Yellowstone National Park. This was my first real visit to the park in the summer of 2004 and was taken on my last day in the park. Despite wanting to get up early every day during the visit, I only managed to do it on the last day. I also saw the most animals and got my best pictures, I lesson I didn’t forget. It seemed like Mother’s Day, as within a few minutes I saw mothers and young not only of elk but also bison, black bears, and moose.
Another picture of the same death-defying chipmunk, in this picture it has found some seeds amongst the needles and is eating them.
They’re terrible at hiding. Just terrible.
There were several aspects I wanted to capture in this picture of an elk in Yellowstone National Park. There’s a slightly comical aspect in that the sleeping bull is almost invisible save for his antlers which stick up out of the tall grass and completely betray his presence. The bull isn’t really trying to hide, but I wondered if he wouldn’t have preferred at that moment to be able to just take the antlers off while he slept, if only so he could lay his head wherever and however he liked.
I also wanted to convey the exhaustion the bulls feel at the end of the rut. He slept most of the time I watched him, but couldn’t resist raising his head and answering the call whenever another bull bugled in the distance. Fortunately all of the people watching him kept their distance so he was able to rest in the quiet periods. A couple of weeks before I visited, one of the bulls had its neck snapped while it was sparring with one of the other bulls. These fights usually aren’t fatal, but add in disease, predators, and the long winter, and I do wonder how many of the animals I see will still be around come spring.
I came across this male pronghorn and a few of his females at the end of the day at Yellowstone’s north entrance in Gardiner, Montana. They were browsing in the meadows near the side of the road, a location I’ve seen pronghorn a number of times. The male had some strange rectagular patches of missing fur on his right side, which reminded me of the shaved patch our cat Templeton got when he went in for surgery.
As I make my plans for this year’s trip to Wyoming, here’s a picture from last year. During my first few hours in Yellowstone, I had stopped to watch some bighorn sheep ambling down a steep hillside when this black bear came up the road and walked over to work on an old carcass that was just skin and bones. It drug the carcass off a ways and then took this large bone and settled down under the tree, lackadaisically gnawing on it like a dog with a bone.
Boolie 