Category Archives: Yellowstone National Park

Off to the United States

geyser I’m off tomorrow for the United States on a 24 day photo tour. The tour takes in two major locations and was arranged by Roger Reynolds at Photoventures. For the first part of the tour we plan to explore a wide variety of locations around the greater Yellowstone area. Obviously, we’ll take in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, but a good chunk of our time will be spent photographing the flora and fauna found in the Beartooth Mountains. This is a really amazing location in South Central Montana and Northwest Wyoming. The mountains and forests around them are part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. I made a similar trip back in the late spring of 2012 and got some really nice photos (see the gallery here). In case you’re wondering why you haven’t seen this gallery before; it’s because I didn’t publish it until very recently. Many of the photos were posted as part of my daily Blog for the trip, but I must have forgotten to upload the final gallery. I’ve posted a couple here as reminders.

Skeleton Trees at Tangled Creek

We were actually quite lucky on that trip because our local wildlife guide had located a Great Grey Owl’s nest deep in one of the forests on the edge of the Beartooth.

Great Grey Owlet, Beartooth Mountains

Hopefully, we’ll be lucky again this time. If not then I suspect the the second part of this tour will make up for any disappointments in so far as it takes us over to Alaska. Yep, Alaska! There we’ll be spending few days at Brook’s Lodge in Katmai National Park photographing the bears as they feed on the salmon making their way up the Brooks River.

Map of Brooks Lodge Area, Katmai National Park

We’ll also spend the remainder of our time photographing around Homer, Eagle River, and the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

All being well, I’ll post a few photos during the trip. Something tells me that I will have used the Canon EOS 7D MkII and EF 100-400m MkII combination for a high proportion of them.

Note: I don’t allow comments on Blog pages, but am more than happy to receive your thoughts on the photos and/or the tutorials etc. Just send an email to ilyons@msn.com

Wild Yellowstone – Day 14 (Cooke City to Jackson Hole)

Day 14 was the final day of photography. We had a 160 or so mile drive from Cooke City to Jackson Hole in front of us. However, before setting off for Jackson Hole we managed to squeeze in another few hours photographing the nesting sites we had visited in previous days. On our way to he nesting sites we spotted our first and only Moose of the trip.

Moose, Clark’s Fork, Beartooth Pass

Mountain Bluebird, Beartooth Pass

Wren Landing at Nest, Beartooth Pass

Bull Elk, Yellowstone Lake, West Thumb

Images edited in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.1

** Disclaimer** Above images are quick previews specifically for this blog so that friends and family can see how I’m getting on.

Wild Yellowstone – Day 9 (Yellowstone National Park)

This was our last full day within the official park boundary. Most of the morning was spent driving along the Grand Loop road towards Gardiner, which we hoped to get to by early afternoon. Our route took us past many of the areas we’d visited earlier in the week (i.e Gibbon River, Elk Meadow, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and Dunraven Pass), but was just as rewarding as it had been previously.

A few miles short of Tower Falls we came across about a half dozen cars parked by the side of the road. Not being an official stop we were fairly sure that this was because bears had been spotted. Are suspicions were correct, but to our delight it was actually a pair of Black Bears (mother and cub) playing amongst the meadow flowers.

Black Bears (mother and cub), Tower Falls Area

A quick stop in Gardiner to check into our motel was followed by the short drive down into the Gardiner Basin. This area is usually the best place to find Pronghorn Antelope, and we weren’t to be disappointed.

Pronghorn Antelope, Gardiner Basin

The Gardiner Basin road is really not much more than a dirt track bounded on one side by mountains and the other by the Yellowstone River. Apart from a few farms and the Pronghorn there usually isn’t a lot else to photograph. However, on this occasion we found a Wheel Line irrigation system in full flow.

Wheel Line Irrigation System, Gardiner Basin