Today was a travel day, and we headed south to Grand Teton National Park. Although we hit some significant wind gusts along Yellowstone Lake, we made good time to Grand Teton and checked in to the Coulter Bay RV campground. We were very surprised the campground was so empty. Two years ago, the campground was full every night. This year, we were coming in the final week of the season, and even with the perfect weather, there were far fewer campers.
We grilled hot dogs for lunch and then drove our favorite wildlife roads. We photographed at Oxbow Bend, checked out Schwabachers Landing, and drove up Shadow Mountain to look for a shot through the aspens. After Oxbow Bend, we stopped at Elk Ranch Flats to shoot the bison. The bison were relatively close to the road and were serving as roosts for the local blackbird population. It really looked strange to see all these bison with a row of birds sitting at the top of their spine. The size of the bison made no difference. There were birds on the largest bulls and the smallest calves. The highpoint of the day was watching the bison hurdlers. After we had walked back to the Explorer, the bison crossed the road behind us and started hurdling the fence to reach the meadow. These are huge animals, and they hurdled the fence bar like it was nothing.
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Our next stop was pronghorn on the Gros Ventre (pronounced Grow Vant) Road. There was a small group close to the road with a larger herd in the distance. They seemed very content to pose for the photographers lined up along the road, and there were lots of photographers trolling for wildlife. Check out the eye lashes and the attitude in the image below. She's sticking her tongue out at me!
We headed back to camp along the inner park road and photographed a lone pronghorn feeding very near the road. I kept moving parallel to him, so he didn't feel threatened, and got quite close. The lighting wasn't great, but he was fun to shoot.
After the pronghorn, it was all about elk. It was now past sunset and there seemed to be bull elk and harems all along the road. Because we're pretty much in the middle of the rut, the big guys were out in all their glory. We got some great opportunities to shoot the big guys, but it was pretty dark. Unfortunately, that meant high ISOs and grainy images. We did get some good interactions between the bulls and the cows.
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