Yellowstone Photos Part 2

Yellowstone.

Created by hotspring.

Hotspring. 

During my second day in Yellowstone, I talked to a man from Vermont who drives to Yellowstone every year for several weeks because "this place grabs a hold of you". Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons took my breath away from the strange variety of hot springs, thermal vents, and mudholes to the wildlife to the constantly shifting landscape. At the higher altitudes, it had snowed the night before - the evergreens were covered in snow and there were multiple mini-snowmen built along the roadside. As I watched Old Faithful erupt, the air was filled with swirling snowflakes and the smell of sulfur.

Injured male elk on side of road.

You've seen Old Faithful, so here's a picture of everyone with cameras
watching Old Faithful.

My animal count for day two included a lone, lanky wolf crossing the road, a black bear and its two cubs, an injured elk, countless bison, and zero grizzlies.The morning I left Yellowstone, I cheated and went to Grizzly and Wolf World, a non-profit zoo that houses injured or unruly wolves and bears (this sounds an awful lot like the reform school I worked at the year after I graduated college).  I went above and beyond trying to find a grizzly in the wild but to no avail. I tried to think of the words of the wise Mick Jagger: "sometimes you don't get what you want but you get what you need". I was able to take over a hundred photos of the bears in their enclosed space - good reference photos for the studio. The large grizzly is over a thousand pounds and its hump is five feet tall!

Thousand pound bear.