Yellowstone Trip

It was the september long weekend, 2005. Or rather, it was the wednesday before. At my job, I don't work on fridays, and monday was a holiday. I asked for tuesday off as well, in order to make a five day weekend.

My original plan was to go down to Seattle, but the hostel was already full (damn long weekend.) My next thought was to go to Banff, but they were forcasting rain for the whole weekend. So I sat down with a map and a set of dividers, marked out a 1000 km circle around Calgary, and decided where to go...

Yellowstone seemed the best choice.

I left work at 3:30 on thursday, drove down to Grand Falls, Montana, and stayed in a motel six overnight, as I was getting pretty tired (my normal bedtime is about 9:30.) The next morning, I set off and drove the rest of the way to the park.

My first day there, I saw lots of neat things that I wanted to photograph. However, I drove past them all in order to get to the Norris campground as soon as possible to stake my claim (and my tent.) I was worried that, being a long weekend, I might not be able to get a spot, but fortunately, there were lots available.

Now established, I drove around, scouting locations and taking photos.

One thing that I found really beautiful was the areas regrowing after the big fires of 1988. Yes, a mature forest is nice, but a new forest is very reassuring.

Of course, on the other hand, dead forests are very photogenic.

When coming around a curve, I had to stop suddenly due to this buffalo walking down the road as calmly as could be. Simple rule: Always yeild to two ton animals. The photo was taken through my windshield, which is why it's kind of crappy.

In the park, buffalo are as thick as flies... Or would be, if there were any flies. It was a good bug-free weekend. Perhaps all the mosquitoes and flies had looked at all the big animals and thought "that's it - I can't compete... I'm moving to Banff."

Despite all the buffalo, Yellowstone's real claim to fame is its geysers.

Now, Old Faithful gets all the press and fame, but my favourite geyser was the Sawmill geyser. It's not as big as it's more famous bretheren, reaching only about 10 metres up, but it erupts almost constantly. It's like a small child saying "hey, hey, look at me" in a bid for attention, but without the annoyingness.

On sunday, I scrambled off-trail up a cliff in a vain attempt to get a good shot of a valley and river. Unfortunately, there was no shot. But I did find a piece of an elk skull.

For those of you who slept through Art History 201, I'll recap: Still lifes originated in the Netherlands in the 16th century. Most of them were vanitas, or memento mori, meaning rememberence of death, and designed to remind people that all on earth is fleeting or transitory, and the only constant is god.

Skulls were pretty common in such still lifes, but to have a fly, the canonical symbol of death and decay, land on the skull while I was shooting just made it perfect.

Towards evening, I came across the omnipresent "animal jam," where a bunch of cars had stopped to gawk at and photograph the wildlife. But, instead of being elk or the omnipresent buffalo, it was a coyote (or wolf; I'm really not sure.)

I pulled out my biggest lens (a 70-200 mm with a 2x extender) and started to photograph him as he hunted mice in the field.

After I'd been shooting a while, I noticed another photographer had pulled up and was shooting as well. The difference was he was shooting with a big, $10,000 500mm lens. I have to admit I felt some envy, but then he said: "I'm going to switch to my 600mm lens; do you want to use my 500?"

Hey you nuns! Would you like to meet the pope?

Moving back to thermal features, there's three types in Yellowstone: Geysers (which erupt,) Fumaroles (which belch steam,) and pools. Although the water in the pools can be as hot as boiling, there are colonies of algae and bacteria that thrive in some of the pools.

Some of the pools are really thick with calcium carbonate, which causes them to form terraces where the water flows off.

One of the neatest things I found was one of the smallest. Around a small hole, which was probably a tiny geyser, little stalagmites had formed, creating a strange, alien landscape.

Although these were pretty far away, and I couldn't get any closer to see for sure, I'd guess these were about 10 centimetres tall.

Random leftover photos