Leaving Yellowstone

As I’ve already said, we had a wonderful time in Yellowstone and I feel confident in saying that we left it just as we found it.
The only things we brought home were a couple souvenirs, maps, memories, and lots of photographs.

I don’t have the high speed equipment to get a good photograph of a black bear AND stay safe so I kept my distance when we came across this fella. I’m fine with that.

We saw beautiful waterfalls and at this spot, we met a nice gentleman with his camera on a tripod shooting in the opposite direction of this waterfall.

He pointed out a baby osprey atop a pillar of rock in the canyon waiting for it’s mom.

There is a wolf den somewhere up in those hills but we never saw a wolf up close. Obviously.

This Bison crossed the stream nervously, looking back again and again. Not sure what was after her but she seemed quite nervous.  She joined the herd after this.

One of our last stops was at the Grand Prismatic Springs…along with the rest of the tourists.

This is the largest hot spring in the United States and the third largest in the world.

It’s colors match the rainbow dispersion of white light by an optical prism: red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.

A great experience was had by the three of us. I’ll admit that I had a little separation anxiety when leaving Yellowstone. We just grew to love it so much and wanted to see more. Fortunately our next stop was Grand Teton National Park. So with butterflies in our bellies, we continued on for  the adventures ahead of us!

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Yellowstone: Wildlife from the Window

Thank you for your kind comments yesterday. I always enjoy hearing from you guys. While I was typing replies and looking over the shots from yesterday, I realized that some of them just didn’t have anything to help with scale. I mean, I’m sure you get it that it’s a large hot spring because the name is Mammoth Hot Springs, but my close-ups and detail shots may not have really shown that.

So in this image above, on the left and beyond the trees, you can see the boardwalk and people. Not only is it huge, it’s high. It was definitely a climb.

Pretty darn impressive.
As I said yesterday, since we didn’t make it to Old Faithful, we sought out landscapes and wildlife in other areas of the park.

One creature that isn’t shy in the daylight or at any time of day in fact is the Raven. They are HUGE! Much larger than the crow that we have at home.

Not only is the size difference a way to determine a raven from a crow, the fluffy feathers around the head and neck is a feature of the raven.

Tower Fall. One of the several waterfalls we visited along the way.

I rolled the window down to get this rumble between two bull bison. The drama didn’t last long.

This coyote casually ran past the bison fight and trotted along with a mission. Not sure where he was going but I thought since he was close, I’d keep the window down for a quick portrait.

We drove for a bit and saw cars pulled off and people out with their cameras just snapping away. Three bull elk were grazing. The one farthest away is a young bull. The two older ones would stomp and chase him away but he’d always come back to graze with them. It’s typical behavior between the young and old. Competition at it’s finest.

I’d like to say that we stayed in the car to get our shots of these guys but we didn’t. We stepped out to get a closer look and we became the average tourist taking a risk to get “the shot”. It’s not a smart thing to do. This is not Disney or a petting zoo. These are wild animals and at anytime, they could look up and see that they are surrounded by a threatening presence of humans. And out of that fear of threat, they could injure any one of us. All I can say is that they are more than likely used to humans ogling at them but if anything were to spook them, we’d be in danger.

Fortunately on this day, these guys were pretty docile and were mostly interested in grazing the bright green grass. I shot this with a telephoto once back in the van. Must be nice to have an impressive rack to scratch that itch.

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