A quick visit to Hayden Valley

The 2016 NXNW destination was Grand Teton National Park. The plan was a few days of landscape photography.

Along with a couple of others in the crew, I arrived a day early. Among the early arrivals was my friend, Rick Louis, who suggested a quick side-trip to Yellowstone National Park to try to photograph wildlife. I enthusiastically said, “YES!”

Rick replied, “Great! Meet me in the hotel parking lot tomorrow morning at 4:30 — It’s a 2 hour drive to Yellowstone!”

4.30 AM. Ouch.

The 4:15 wakeup call hurt, and the drive was long, but it was well worth it. We arrived at Hayden Valley around 6:30, rounded a bend and saw a handful of cars parked on the side of the road by the river. We assumed they were photographers photographing something worth photographing, so we pulled over.

They were indeed photographers. And what they were photographing was indeed well worth photographing.

They were facing the eastern bank of the river, which was cast in shadow. We asked one of them what they saw. He pointed into the shadow and said, “a grizzly eating an elk calf.”

Damn.

Rick and I quickly reached for all the lens reach we muster (~800mm in my case) and got to work.

We set up on the river bank and fired away for a good 20 minutes. Two or three hundred frames later, we took a break, looked up and looked around.

The small crowd of photographers had swelled to at least a couple dozen. Joining us was a dozen or so Bison that had meandered down from the bluff to the west. They were wandering between the cars and precariously close to us mortal photographers.

Two or three Park Rangers joined us in an effort to keep us separated from the Bison — Bison traffic cops.

It really was a magical, memorable morning.