Tag Archives: Oxbow Bend

Oxbow Joy

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Three young me happily paddle a canoe at sunrise at Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park

I like to shoot with two cameras when I can tolerate the extra room and weight. While at Oxbow Bend to photograph Mount Moran at sunrise, I noticed these three young men grinning from ear-to-ear while paddling a canoe off to my left. Leaving my main camera on the tripod with its wide angle zoom attached, I grabbed my backup camera with the telephoto zoom and grabbed a quick snapshot. There’s more than one way to enjoy the Oxbow sunrise.

I took this picture in 2006. At the time, the Canon 20D was my main camera and the 10D the backup. When Canon announced the 7D, I wanted to get it and move the 20D into the backup role, but you can’t always get what you want …

10 Years

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A view of Mount Moran at sunrise from Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park

It’s been 10 years. I registered the racphoto.com domain on October 25, 1999.

The site itself is much older as I started it while in graduate school at Virginia Tech and ran it off the personal storage I had on the servers there. I didn’t keep track of when the site first went live — which is a shame but who knew what was to come? — but at the latest it would have been 1996 and might have been a year or two earlier. To put that in context, Google didn’t launch until September of 1998.

But 1999 was the year the site grew up and got a real domain name. While the pictures have improved as I’ve improved as a photographer, the look of the site hasn’t changed much in the past decade. I still hand code the main site and while there are things I’d like to do to improve it, my focus has always been on keeping things simple to make it easier to maintain.

The blog is a relative newcomer and didn’t arrive until January 2006, starting off with a story of Templeton swallowing a sewing needle, and I certainly don’t hand code it and use WordPress instead.

This picture of Mount Moran at sunrise comes from 2006, taken from Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park. Everybody, and I mean everybody, photographs the mountains from here. I’ve done it on a couple of different occasions, but I also enjoy photographing the southern part of the range where you can watch the sunrise in quiet solitude.

Why Did The Grouse Cross The Road?

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Close-up view of a dusky grouse's head

I don’t know. Frankly I’m not sure it did either.

The trip had been mixed, fun but not quite as exciting as previous years. The previous night in Yellowstone I had picked up a puncture in one tire and had to put on a spare, then drove down in the morning to West Yellowstone to get it patched. Coming back into the park around noon, the ranger told me the route I had planned to take (past the thermal features in the Old Faithful area) was closed due to ice so I went over toward Hayden Valley, hiked a bit, then worked my way south and out of the park.

My luck continued as I saw little wildlife that day and that continued into the Tetons, where I didn’t see a single animal as I drove down to Willow Flats. When I approached Oxbow Bend I saw a large bird near the side of the road — my first thought was pheasant, but as I got closer I realized it was a dusky grouse. I had seen them before in the park but never down that low.

I pulled over onto the wide shoulder, thinking there was little chance the bird would stick around, but it didn’t flee as I gingerly got out of the car. I grabbed the tripod and 500mm lens and set up to take some pictures. I wasn’t surprised that the camera couldn’t focus on the moving bird in low light, but I was surprised at where it was moving: the grouse was walking directly towards me.

It soon walked too close for the lens to focus, so I backed away from the camera and watched this beautiful creature walk right up towards the car. It stopped near my rear bumper and then walked right under the car. I spun the camera around, hoping I might get a picture as it walked away. I waited and waited for it to emerge from under the car, but to no avail.

I leaned over and looked under the car, and lo and behold, the grouse seemed happy to be out of the rain and was pecking around in the pebbles. It spent a while there before starting to emerge near the tires. I was a little alarmed since it was right next to the road, but thankfully traffic was non-existent.

I stood near the road to coax it out from under the car, and after several false starts I did manage to get it to walk out further from the road. At this point I took some head shots with my other camera like the one shown here. But the bird slowly started to walk back towards, and then onto, the road. At this point an SUV started to approach so I stood in the lane until the bird waddled across the road, then I stepped back as the SUV got close and roared pass.

Playing crossing guard was the least I could do as thanks for such a close encounter and one of my favorite moments from the trip.