02.14.09
Bela takes a day off and a frosty, landscapey day
So friday was the last full day of the tour with Dale and after 5 full days of “photo-ing” bela decided that he’d like a day off, not that i blame him he was quite the trooper! Occasionally i’d pull the “give me that lens right off your camera” in the chaos of seeing cool animals so I commend him for lasting that long 
So he enjoyed a down day of working on his book and i imagine a lot of vegging and tv time. He was also quite smart as it was one of the coldest days we had in the park.
As we left Gardiner it was around 5 degrees dropping a few degrees as we drove through the park. Now the one good thing about the freezing cold in a wintry place is that there is some cool snow crystals that float around in the air and sometimes create cool phenomena – this morning it was a sun beam. So we made a stop as we saw some elk in a valley and thought it might make a cool elkscape.
Our first stop wasn’t our coldest either- that was probably only -5 or so, not so bad actually! We continued our way through Little America and saw some cool frosty bison. We’d been hoping for wolves but they seemed pretty quiet.
We continued on to Lamar Valley and with no wolves coming out to play we decided to take advantage of some really cool frosty trees along a little creek. This ended up being one of my favorite spots for landscapes for the day and I just kept shooting the steamy creek. Unfortunately it was also the coldest spot we hit getting down to -17. I ended up having to break out foot and hand warmers which helped immensely.
We eventually moved on doing a couple of trips up and down the main road in hopes of more fun animals, we had a few sheep spottings far up a hill but nothing that called us so we decided to just do landscapes until something caught our eyes. And honestly after the previous day’s “catches” it’d be hard to follow so it was kind of fitting. So we made a few more stops along the way to Cooke City – after which the road is closed – and took advantage of the blue skies and pretty vistas.
We had our lunch in Cooke City where it actually warmed up to 17 degrees- a 34 degree jump – heat wave! We saw a moose on the way off in the willows – not a photo op but cool to see yet another animal. On our way back the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep finally had worked their way down the hill so we were able to get a few shots of them eating their grass.
We again trolled for action, I think we may have heard some rumorings of wolves but no major sightings but i wasn’t complaining – i was looking forward to getting back at a decent time and getting some sleep