Yellowstone Photography Tour - Day 1

On Sunday morning, Laurie drove Colin and me to Bozeman to meet our Yellowstone guide, Tom Murphy. If you don't know already, Tom is the premier photographer of Yellowstone National Park. As it turned out, there was only one other photographer on this tour. Bill was a serious photographer from Arkansas who had more photograhic toys than I knew existed! It was a bit intimidating to be such an amateur photographer on this trip with Tom and Bill. Oh well, at least Colin and I had the potential to learn a lot in the next 5 days.

After our drive through Paradise Valley to get to the northwest entrance of the park at Gardiner, MT, our first stop was Swan Lake Flat. Within 25 yards of the road Tom spotted a pair of sandhill cranes and their chick. Here are a few feeble attempts to capture these special birds.





Our tour was off to a terrific start indeed!!

After watching the cranes for a half hour or so, we drove a bit futher south, parked at a pullout and proceeded to hike into Gardners Hole. This was a nice hike into a valley I had never seen before. It only took a short hike west to find this wonderful valley. Tom found a large grizzly bear track in the dirt at one spot. We looked all over for any signs of movement in the distance but to no avail. On our way back to the car, we met some rangers who were setting up a bear trap to catch a black bear who had been causing problems at the nearby campground. There's always something going on in Yellowstone...