Yellowstone National Park - Part 2
The next couple of days were spent roaming about the Lamar Valley.
Exhausted from the previous day’s work, we decided to have an easy morning. And despite us being lazy, Yellowstone presented us with one of her many unexpected gifts.
It’s pretty strange when you hear grunting outside your vehicle in the morning and realize that a herd of bison have decided the campground is for breakfast.
As you can see, getting out of the campground took a while, but the bison were kind enough to move out of our way . . . eventually. I guess it is a bit unusual that you can get so comfortable with certain types of wildlife being around you that you don’t freak out every time there’s “a bison!” around. That’s one of the advantages of staying in one area for so long, you get used to its creatures and its rhythms so that everything seems just as it should. In this case, wonderful and normal.
We spent that day and the next stopping and exploring several of the places we’d scouted out previously. Ann had noticed an area along Slough Creek that she thought I’d find interesting for doing compositions and I found, among other subjects, a nice burnt out tree trunk to photograph.
The Beartooth Highway, which runs from Yelllowstone’s northeast entrance to Red Lodge, Montana, had been closed by snow since the storm that hit the day before we had arrived and looked like it wasn’t going to open back up. So Ann and I started scouting other possible trips and came up with heading down the Chief Joseph Highway, which cuts south (and generally lower in elevation) from Cooke City, whereas the Beartooth keeps heading east (and generally higher in elevation).
We weren’t in any rush, so we took our time heading out the Lamar Valley. It had finally offered me the view of a tree I wanted to photograph so we made an early stop
After breakfast in Cooke City, the Chief Joseph Highway did not disappoint. It was a beautiful drive, and we found a nice bend in the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River to photograph.
We spent quite a while there exploring the rocks and simply enjoying the spectacular views from the river.
The rest of the day was interesting with drives up plateaus and down. We came across one stretch of ponds that we thought had potential, but the clouds had rolled in. We decided to return the next day under better light to see what it had to offer.
The next morning we got up bright and early and headed back out the valley. Just as we were approaching Pebble Creek, we came across some fog and I pulled over following the adage of don’t pass up a photograph just because you think there’s a better one at your destination.
The morning mist wafting in the distance was simply magical.
Unfortunately, our destination wasn’t. By the time we got there, although it was still fairly early morning, there were no clouds in the sky at all and the sunlight was disturbingly harsh. I was adamant about at least trying even though the light wasn’t perfect, but it was a pale image compared to what both Ann and I thought was the potential of the place.
The quality of the light can make all the difference in the world.
On the way back, we headed off-road to explore some camping areas to the east of Cooke City that I’d scouted on Google Earth before the trip. It’s always good to have fall-back locations in case the campgrounds are full and Beast hadn’t had nearly as much time in 4-wheel drive as she’d wanted this trip. The drive up to the plateau was disturbingly steep in parts, but nothing compared to what Beast had done, and easily so, before. We eventually made it to a lake and turned around for our planned afternoon/evening shoot in Lamar Valley.
Our plan was to photograph at two locations. The first was a late afternoon shoot looking up the valley towards the mountains from an area we had photographed from during our first trip to Yellowstone. That location didn’t disappoint, offering us a variety of subjects to photograph, to include the opportunity to watch a couple of antelope make their way down to the river, with bison way-off in the distance.
As the shadows filled the valley, we made our way back up the valley to turn around and photograph looking into the setting sun. I quickly settled on a more abstract composition of the sunset, reflections in the water and dark shoreline.
Unfortunately, what had been another lovely day photographing in Yellowstone turned out to not be over. After hiking back to Beast we headed down-valley towards Slough Creek. We quickly came upon a traffic back-up at a location we’d seen a bison herd coming down towards the river. While a line of vehicles had stopped to let the herd cross the road, some impatient Yahoo decided to whip around the line of vehicles and flew by them . . . only to run into and over a bison. The vehicle was totaled and in the middle of the road. The bison was dead. And we were in the Lamar Valley "no bars on your cell phone" areas.
One of the accessories Ann and I invested in when building Beast was a cell-phone booster. In addition to a satellite emergency beacon we carry with us, it was one of those “you never know if you’re ever going to use it but if you need it you’re going to hate yourself for not having it” items that makes life more expensive than it could be. Anyway, this was one of those “needed it” moments so we mounted my phone into the cradle and . . . 2 bars. Not LTE, but enough to make a voice call. 911 responded immediately and didn’t seem the least surprised that there had been a vehicle-bison accident in the Lamar Valley. A ranger was on his way. Hopefully we never “need” the booster again.
The next day we decided to photograph an area between the Lamar Valley and Mammoth that we’d scouted earlier in the trip. This is the day that the shooting the shooter post was on. As noted in that post, the initial scouted site didn’t pan out as well as I’d hoped (in part for the same reasons the ponds from the previous day didn’t - too much direct sunlight), but heading back to the Lamar Valley we saw that the previously closed Blacktail Plateau Drive (a dirt road) was open, so we took the long way home.
Like the previous day’s drive, Beast enjoyed a bit of 4WD and the views the road gave us were splendid.
And as we hung a left at Tower Junction into the Lamar Valley, the sign that gave the status of the Beartooth Highway said “Open.” Which was a change from when we passed it that morning. Our plans for the next day were set!
The Beartooth Highway is simply spectacular. It rises to a plateau that is over 10,000 feet in elevation and is considered one of the most beautiful roads in the United States. As we drove upwards from Cooke City, it became obvious why the road had been closed the entire time we had been there. Snow was piled up everywhere, and the place looked like a white moonscape.
We drove across the plateau and headed down towards Red Lodge. In Red Lodge we had a great lunch, grabbed some fresh bakery items (not as good as the fritters) and wound up having a long conversation with the owner of a metal shop where we’d parked Beast. She and her husband were doing their own custom conversion of a Dodge Sprinter and she had lots of questions. We had some for her, which included whether a dirt road we’d seen coming down the plateau was worth taking. She said yes, so we took it before heading back up the Beartooth Highway. That road ended just before the bottom of the valley you can see below and is the trailhead for the hike up to the mountain lake.
The afternoon was progressing and we’d been warned that you don’t want to be driving the Beartooth at night, given the potential for ice to form once the sun sets. That and they just might close it. So we headed back up. Pulled over at a pull-out at one point and grabbed our camera gear.
You can see the road making its way up in the distance.
Driving across the plateau we saw several locations where we want to return to when there isn’t snow around. And from my scouting, we know there are roads into the plateau that we can take with Beast and just camp out for a few days. But it wasn’t going to happen this trip!
We had also gotten some unfortunate news while in Red Lodge - a series of storms were coming through starting that evening. As our new friend said, the first one won’t be so bad, but the second one a couple of days after that is going to be nasty.
The clouds that rolled in as we descended the Beartooth Highway seemed to confirm the forecast. After checking one last time in Cooke City, we decided that it was wiser to try and beat the upcoming storm and get over the mountains. We’d just spend the last few days of the trip photographing geysers!