A few weeks ago our class went to Yellowstone National Park to learn about the diverse wildlife issues managers there have to deal with. It's a two day trip each way, which was pretty uneventful (for the purposes of this blog), except that we passed through the town of Wallace, Idaho, once known as the bordello capital of Idaho. They call this "full-season mountain recreation" on their official website.
Except for amusing history lessons, I'll focus here more on the "safari" aspect of the trip: we spent many hours each day touring the northern range of the park and watching wildlife.
A few minutes into our first day, we stumbled across these bison grazing on a frozen swamp.
We couldn't get too close, apparently squashed tourists are a management nightmare, but I was able to get reasonably good photos with my telephoto lens. We saw lots of cool animals in the park, but these were by far my favourite.
This picture was taken by my friend Courtney. I grew the beard specifically for this trip. You can't look like a wimp in Montana - a place with roads named Hellroaring Av.
Towards the end of our first day, this guy was hanging out by the edge of the road. They're used to people (we provide protection from the wolves), so we could get really close.
It turns out it's hard to get good pictures of wildlife. These are my two favourite - most of the others aren't great due to cud chewing, not looking at the camera, etc.
This was taken looking south from Gardiner MT, where we were staying. There was less snow here, so we saw many pronghorns in this area (the second fastest animal on earth - right in our backyard... cool)
The scenery by the road was neat. There were plenty of bighorn sheep in this area.
This is near the park entrance. The picture isn't all that great, but if you look, you'll see elk, mule deer, and pronghorns, which I thought was kind of cool.
This was also taken by Courtney.
A big portion of our trip was devoted to looking at wolves. They were introduced from BC and Alberta in '94, and have now thoroughly established themselves. Interestingly, they have spawned a "wolf viewing" sub-culture: a group of people who happily devote all of their free time in front of fabulously expensive gear to view wolves that are often several kilometers distant. It's hard to believe it if you haven't seen it, but these people are able to spot greyish wolves on a greyish background amongst grayish rocks at that distance, and then manage to find them again with spotting scopes.
At any rate, with limited scopes and little wolf activity, I decided to light off on my own to get some peace and quiet (I'm a man of action, I can't sit around in the cold). My friend Ken Huang snapped this as I made my way to the hills.
This is the best picture of one of the wolves I have. It was taken by Hajar, a classmate (few of us can pronounce it either), through the window of the bus.
A bighorn on the way out one day - again, from the window of the bus.
This is a coyote. We saw lots of them.
YNP was created to protect the hotsprings. These are near the town of Mammoth, inside the park.
This is chemotrophic bacteria (they use sulfur instead of light for energy) in a ditch on the side of the road.
The trees don't do well in near the springs, but they look neat. Back in the day, tourists liked to bathe in the pools, which led to the problem of determining how to allot time for men and women evenly. Hilarious. Bathing is still allowed in some places, but not here.
I liked the look of the trees in this area.
This is the boiling river. The water here comes out of the rock at near scalding temperatures and flows into the Gardiner River (I think), which is frigid.
Bathing is allowed here, so we hopped in for an hour or so. Many of us tried the cold water too, which turned out (surprisingly) to be much less fun.
This is another Ken Huang original on a day when I decided to explore rather than watch wolves near the bus.
This is a photo down the Lamar Valley. A beautiful spot. If it weren't for the fact that there were wolves around, I'd have slapped on the snowshoes here too and explored a bit more (the wolves aren't dangerous - I think - but it's illegal to disturb them).
Here are the wolf watchers. Those spotting scopes go for $500-$2500, and some of the telephoto lenses can cost as much as $16,000. These people spend a lot of money on looking at wolves. It's incredible.
These bison were hanging out just below the wolves on the hill. Apparently they started rolling like puppies, but I missed it.
Pronghorns. I think Hajar took this one.
I played with my camera a lot on this trip. I'm getting better with it. Ken Huang took this one too.
This is from the bus. Bison are either really stupid, or totally indifferent to traffic. I'm inclined to believe the latter.
All of these were taken from the bus.
On one of the days we took off with a biologist to check out a wolf kill. This is Britta playing with a femur (we're a different breed). Photo by Hajar.
On the way back I could take the easy route back with the herd, or I could go the hard way on my own. It was an easy decision. Hajar took this one too.
This was our last wildlife sighting in the park, on the way out the last day. Bighorn sheep on a slope just above a sign marking 45 degrees north.
All in all it was a pretty neat trip. I recommend it for a nice winter vacation (2 million people in the summer... not worth it).
For those of you who weren't in on it, we went to Sarah's parents' for the first week, in Southampton, near Owen Sound. This is on the beach.
We also took off to MacGregor Point Provincial Park for snowshoeing trips. Neat place, but you'd never know it from the lack of pictures.
This is Keenan, Sarah's nephew, at the in-laws.
We took a walk out to the trailer for a day, it was one of our few sunny days in Ontario... People complain about rain in BC, but think we've gotten way more sun this year than you guys.
Rosy in the snow. It took a mere 2349863 tries to get this one just right.
I also insisted on going out to see the sunset, which was pretty neat over the ice. Sadly, I had my camera on the wrong setting, so a bunch of them didn't turn out all that well.
This is is the Southampton museum. Interestingly, this tiny town has a better museum than Vancouver. Better displays, more interesting stories, you name it. And it was much cheaper. In this shot Keenan got in the way of the giant squid model.
There was some stuff for Sarah to play with too: she got bored reading about local history.
I have no idea what the educational value of these things is... but Keenan liked them.
Dad lent me his 50mm f1.4-22 lens. It was good fun, if anyone is looking for gift ideas...
This is the museum in Toronto, everybody seems to be complaining, but I thought it was cool.
Our dog being generally useless.
Julien and Megan's dog being generally useless. You'd figure we'd have more family pictures, but most of the shots were of dogs... and a few of Sarah. Weird.
