My biggest fear about going to Wyoming wasn’t that I’d be eaten by a grizzly bear. Nor that I’d be caught flat-footed, sans hedgehog, by a pack of wolves. Nor even that my brains would be devoured by the famed zombie bison of Gros Ventre. No, my biggest fear was that my camera would die in the middle of nowhere and leave me on the horns of a dilemma: whether to soldier on without it or to try and find a replacement in one of the small towns at the edges of the parks.

I thought about this for several weeks leading up to the trip but couldn’t come up with a viable solution. On the one hand, my beloved Canon 7D isn’t that old (it turned two yesterday) and is better built than any of my previous cameras. On the other hand, I’ve probably worked it harder and taken more pictures during those two years than all the previous cameras combined. I’m not sure if that’s strictly true, but if it’s an exaggeration, it’s not much of one.

Fortunately the 7D survived with nary a hiccup. It did stop responding at one point and turning it off and on again had no effect. I ejected the battery to force a hard reset and when it booted up normally my heart rate gradually returned to normal levels.

I haven’t been too pleased with many of the design decisions Canon has made with their cameras the past handful of years, but I think they hit a home run with the 7D and it is hands down my favorite camera of all time.