Wonderful Wyoming
I recently spent two weeks photographing in Wyoming, including Yellowstone, the Wind River mountains, and the Grand Tetons (yep, it’s true—the Tetons were named by French trappers who thought the peaks looked like massive, pointy breasts—don’t blame me, I didn’t name them). Summer shooting is always the most difficult, and typically the least productive. One has to successfully negotiate long days with little sleep, hordes of tourists, and even larger hordes of biting insects. This trip proved to be no exception, with each area I visited heaping on its unique brand of difficulty. I started in Grand Teton, where the days were long, but surprisingly, the tourists were relatively few. Then on to Yellowstone, where I spent most of my time driving (to be more precise, not driving) through traffic jams caused by road construction and wild animal sightings. And finally, four days of backpacking in the Wind River mountains, where I was free from the tourists but at the mercy of a voracious cloud of mosquitoes. I haven’t decided which was worse.
To sum things up, I got little sleep on this trip, and barely enough good images to call it successful. Just barely. But trips can be like that. Some, like my Patagonia adventure, are incredibly productive, with great light almost every day. Others . . . not so great. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining; a bad day as a professional nature photographer still beats a good day in the office. But nonetheless, considering the investment in time, money, and, during my trek into the Wind River range—actual blood—a non-productive trip can be a real bummer. So I guess I am complaining, if only just a little bit.
Despite the hardships and general zombie-like feeling resulting from lack of sleep, I still managed to make a few images that I am happy with, three of which I will share here. The first is from the Grand Tetons, and the whole reason I drove two-thirds of the way across country: to capture the balsam root bloom at Antelope Flats. This image was made on the first morning after I arrived, and proved to be the only morning clouds I saw during my whole time in the Tetons and Yellowstone. I knew when I made this image that I was unlikely to get a better one of the flowers during the rest of the trip, but nonetheless I tried several other mornings, but to no avail. To me, it is the drooping flowers that make this shot, as they create a shape that relates to the curving shapes in the clouds above.
"Dawn Storm" - Grand Teton National Park
This second image was taken at Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone. I’ve recently posted on my website a gallery of images I’ve taken over the years of the geothermal features of Yellowstone, but this one was not included because it was too similar to another image in the gallery. It is, nonetheless, one of my favorites from the trip. Grand Prismatic gets its otherworldly colors from bacteria living in the warm spring waters. Orange bacteria mats dominate the water draining from the pool, whereas brilliant blues are found in the pool itself. The steam that rises from the pool often takes on this blue color.
"Grand Prismatic Spring" - Yellowstone National Park
Finally, while in the Wind River mountains, I spent several days in vain camped above remote Lonesome Lake below the mighty Cirque of the Towers. I never got any great sunrise or sunset light while I was there, and most of the nearby passes where still snowed in, preventing me from really exploring the area. One morning, I made this photograph of a small waterfall below Warbonnet Peak, converting it to black and white as I was well past the golden hour of dawn. Although the image is not entirely to my liking, I think that it captures something of the wild beauty of this rugged area.
"War Bonnet" - Wind River Mountains
I’ll be back out West soon, this time heading to Mt. Rainier to spend two weeks backpacking the Wonderland Trail around the mountain. By heading deep into the wilderness, I should be able to avoid the tourists and traffic jams, if not the mosquitoes (hopefully they won’t be as bad as in the Wind River range). I don’t expect that I will get much sleep, and with many gruelling days of hard backpacking, I suspect I will come back looking like the living dead. But hopefully, I’ll take enough great images to make it worth the effort!
