Our plan today was to look for wildlife along Sedge and Mary Bays and then return to West Thumb Geyser Basin. We arrived at Steamboat Point just after a family of grizzlies topped a ridge and then disappeared. As if trying to make up for missing the grizzlies, the clouds parted enough to see the snow-covered mountains in the distance just as we hiked out to Steamboat Point. Timing is everything.
We continued along Sedge Bay, but we didn't see anything to shoot. We turned around and returned to Mary Bay where Carol saw something brown moving in the distance. We pulled into a turnout and discovered we were looking at a pair of sandhill cranes. We've heard them throughout the week along the Yellowstone River, but we hadn't seen any since the first night at Swan Lake. The cranes were a long ways away and seemed content to move along the bottom of the ridge out in the distance. We were all ready to hike out into the sagebrush to set ourselves up to improve the lighting and get within a reasonable distance when I saw a sign saying the area was closed for bear management. That meant we would have to shoot from the road. The cranes must have felt sorry for us because they changed direction and started angling toward us. They never got close to us, but they were close enough that we could get some good shots of them moving through the sagebrush.
Carol saw an intersting point sticking out into Mary Bay and now the clouds had lifted, so we backtracked to photograph the steam from the geysers at Steamboat Point, the trees and rocks on the point, Yellowstone Lake, and the snow-covered mountains in the distance.
We returned to camp to eat lunch and get cleaned up before going out for the afternoon. Unfortunately, the clouds filled the sky in the afternoon, and we used the afternoon to get caught up on some of our chores.
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