Lamar Valley
We returned to the Lamar Valley today, with the ultimate goal of hiking to Trout Lake to photograph a family of otters. That meant another long day driving over 100 miles in the park.
We waited for the skies to clear this morning before we left for Tower Falls. We got there about 11:30, which seemed to work because the rainbow was still visible. Tower Falls was nice, but the highpoint was the ice cream we bought at the Yellowstone General Store. All the ice cream sold here is made in Montana, and it was delicious. Lunch would have to wait until later.
As we dropped down toward the Lamar Valley, we hit a huge bearjam. It was the same mother black bear and two cubs that we had seen earlier in the week. We found a place to pull off the highway and joined the crowd watching the bears. The mother bear decided to cross the road, which stopped all traffic and gave us an opportunity to get some good images of the cubs. The three rangers kept everyone back, but once the bears had crossed the road, they wanted to feed right at the roadside. That was too dangerous, so the rangers began throwing handfuls of sand at them until they finally ambled into the woods.
When we reached the Lamar Valley, there were huge herds of bison grazing up and down the valley. It provided a hint of what it used to look like before the bison were slaughtered for sport. We're normally here in the fall, so the green valley, the river completely filling the banks, and the snow-capped mountains in the distance were a special treat for us.
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Our destination was Trout Lake, but when we arrived the parking lot was full. We continued up toward the pass until we reached a picnic area near Barronette Peak where we had a delicious lunch along the river. We found a parking place when we returned to Trout Lake, so we got out our bear bells, bear spray, bear horn, and camera gear and hiked up to Trout Lake. No one we talked to had seen the otter family, but it was an interesting alpine lake with the volcanic cliffs and forest in the background. All the sagebrush areas around the lake were filled with small wildflowers. Our best find was a couple of Calypso orchids.
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When we dropped back down into the Lamar Valley on our way back to camp, we stopped for a bison bull lying in a wildflower meadow. He was very close to the road and the lighting was nearly perfect. He was content to watch us photograph him, so we got along fine.
Continuing down the Lamar Valley, we stopped for three pronghorn antelope who were intermixed with a small herd of bison. They walked toward the road and then parallel with it, so we were able to get some pretty good shots. But they were nothing compared to the images we took near the trailhead to Specimen Ridge. Right next to a huge turnout was a herd of pronghorn with two more groups up on the ridge. The lighting was perfect and the pronghorn were more interested in playing than eating. They chased each other, practiced sparring, and generally were having a good time. They often split into groups of three or four for a while, and then they would rejoin the larger group. This was repeated several times. The cool part was that we weren't just getting photographs. We were photographing behaviors. We probably photographed them for an hour.
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Our final stop of the day was at the upper end of Hayden Valley to shoot the sunset. The sun was setting behind us, and we nearly missed the color across the sky. We're still not used to the 9:00 sunsets.
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