Madison River Morning

Click to Follow Venture Moola!

Sorry, to be a day late with this posting but we are just back from two weeks out West. Our trip took us to northern Idaho, then east along the Clark River through Missoula  to Yellowstone National Park and ended with a few days in Jackson, Wyoming enjoying the Grand Teton Mountain range and the national park that bears its name.

This image is from our third day in Yellowstone, when I got up early to photograph the sunrise and spend some early hours looking for wildlife. My hopes for a sunrise were thwarted by a heavy cloud cover that remained over Yellowstone from the snowfalls we experienced the day before. Traveling out West at the end of April into early May means the weather will be unpredictable and often cold and snowy.

The temperatures had risen overnight into the mid 30s, so much of the snowfall had disappeared by the time I took this photo. What you are seeing is the Madison River flowing west out of Yellowstone. We had seen bison and elk driving into the park from West Yellowstone a couple of days before so I hoped to catch one or the other that morning. At just after sunrise in early May, there were hardly any cars on the road which raised my hopes of finding some animals to practice photographing.

We plan to head to Kenya and the Masai Reserves later in the year to see African wildlife and take some pictures, so a trip to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons is not only great in and of itself, it also serves as a chance to practice photographing mega fauna in the wild. Ranging across these two parks are bison, elk, grizzlies, black bears and moose, to name a few.

I will be writing more about the trip and sharing images of the animals we saw in later entries in this blog. Suffice to say for now that less than a mile east of where this early picture was taken, I happened upon a pair of elk grazing by the river.

Taking my time to compose images and just watch the scene unfold, I was treated to a rare sighting in the park, a lone wolf scampering beside the riverbank toward the elk. I  had the good fortune to photograph what transpired and that will be the subject of our next post.

Image copyright 2018 by Clinton Richardson. All photos and text copyright Clinton Richardson. This and other images from Yellowstone and Grand Teton are posted on our sister site at www.Trekpic.com in our Wild Wyoming Gallery.

If you like these posts, please tell your friends about the Venture Moola blog at Readjanus.com. And, feel free to share this blog. The more readers the better.  Click here to subscribe to a weekly email that tells you when we issue new entries. Or, click in the column to the left to follow us on Facebook or Twitter.