Grant Nakamura’s Photography Blog

As is often the case, my itinerary changed… Instead of skiing I decided to make a tour of my favorite fly fishing guides. I had already seen Chris McAdams in Missoula while I was attending the PHOTOFocus workshop. On Tuesday, rather than heading to Bozeman, I went to Dillon and saw Leon Sagaloff at Frontier Anglers. Of course, what’s a visit to Dillon without a stop at the Patagonia Outlet Store on Idaho Street.

I headed on to West Yellowstone for a visit with Jake Chutz, our guide last fall on the Henry’s Fork. Jake is working the off-season as a guide and snowcoach driver for Yellowstone Alpen Guides in West.

Jake picked me up at my motel and his other guests at their motel and we were off to Canyon inside Yellowstone National Park. Throughout the tour Jake gave us general and in-depth information on the natural history of the park. On our drive in from the west entrance we stopped at the area of the 1988 fire and discussed the natural cycle of forest growth and how wildfires are an integral part of that cycle.

We stopped near the well-known eagles’ nest on the south side of the road, but no eagles there. However, just up the road, there were two perched high in a dead lodgepole pine on the opposite bank of the Madison River.

As we continued down the road toward the Madison Junction, Jake had high hopes of seeing an elk carcass that he and his clients had seen the day before. He was also hoping that we would be able to catch a glimpse of the wolves that they had seen there, too. Unfortunately, when we arrived the carcass was gone! You could see where it had lain on the opposite bank of the Madison, but no carcass or wolves were found.

Less than a mile down the road we found a small herd of elk grazing on an island and the banks of the river. They did not seem to be the least bit affected by the presence of the kill just down the road.

Two coyotes were the center of attention of a photography group as we came up the road towards Norris. They were posing for the group as they were interrupted in their search for rodents near Terrace Springs.

The one thing that I really noticed as we drove through the park was the peacefulness of the winter scene. Last summer as we drove the road from Norris to Madison, the road construction caused massive delays and long lines of cars and trucks. There are no cars or trucks in this part of the park in the winter. There are only 78 snowcoaches and 316 snowmobiles permitted in the entire park on a given day in the winter. This was fantastic, along with the fact that our coach had a realistic top speed of 35 mph and a nice causal cruising speed of about 20 mph.

We stopped at Gibbon Falls and then stopped again by the hot springs and fumeroles on the way to Norris. We then proceeded up to the central plateau and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River.

There were a trio of bison lounging by the side of the road from Canyon to Lake.

The North Rim Drive was deserted except for a couple of “packs” of snowmobilers. The winter landscape at Lookout Point is so strikingly different than the summer/fall.

A quick visit to Artist Point on the South Rim again showed how the snowscape is so different than that of the summer landscape. Also, the lack of people was so nice. The parking area that was full to overflowing last July was completely vacant when we arrived.

Our return to West included a detour north at Norris to view a small bison herd between the road and the Gibbon River. They were very casual for the most part, but suddenly a few began to walk along the road scattering a group of photographers.

A beautiful scene in the Gibbon Meadows greeted us as the sun broke through the clouds lighting up the meadows and the few bison resting there.

Just before we exited the park and after a drive along the Madison River on Riverside Drive there was an unexpectedly beautiful sunset to cap an extraordinary winter day in the Park.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Travelogues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.