Boolie » Yellowstone National Park

The First Carrot

Boolie — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:52:47 +0000

The past few years at work have been productive but stressful and the last year in particular left me worn down and burned out. I hadn’t taken much vacation time but we either use-it-or-lose-it at the end of the year, so I was trying to decide if I should take most of the month of December off, or if I should take my normal fall hiking trip and then take a few weeks off at the end of the year. While the idea of a month away from work was very appealing, I decided to split up the vacation and take the hiking trip instead.

I realized that as a reaction to the stress I had settled into a funk and wasn’t getting things done that needed to be done. Needing either carrot or stick to get back on track, I settled on carrots with Yellowstone & the Tetons as Carrot Number One. Planning for the weeklong trip of hiking and photography forced me into action.

My contacts had long since run out and while I had been wearing my glasses instead, I prefer to photograph in contacts so I finally scheduled my overdue eye exam and got new contacts. And since it often rains during my fall hiking trips, I picked up some waterproof hiking shoes to replace my worn out pair, a small army of hiking socks to replace my threadbare contingent, and a couple pairs of waterproof gloves. All of which guaranteed a week of unusually hot and sunny weather during my week in Wyoming, but the wet weather gear has been put to good use ever since with the return of the rainy season to the Northwest.

Since I would be taking our much loved but aging Subaru Outback, I took her in for everything from routine maintenance to replacing a broken sensor and leaking head gasket and especially the broken cargo cover that left all my gear exposed to prying eyes. I also fired up iTunes to create some new CD mixes of recent music purchases to keep me entertained on the long drive.

Then there was an extra memory card and battery for my Canon 7D, which I’ve been meaning to order for a year or two, plus a portable hard drive for storage on the road. The hard drive was a much improved solution compared to the DVD’s I used to burn, the backups of the day’s pictures went much faster meaning I could get to sleep sooner. And while I didn’t need the new memory card for most of the trip, oh was I thankful to have it when I met this black bear eating pine cones on my way down from Mount Washburn. Yellowstone put on a show on my last day and I had taken a ton of pictures, and if not for the new card I would not have been able to photograph this wonderful creature during my last hours before heading for home. The extra card was also put to good use during my Christmas visits to Ridgefield.

There were other things too, like the car mount for the iPhone so that the little genius woman in the TomTom GPS app could guide me safely there and back again despite my notoriously poor sense of direction. Both the mount (from RAM Mounts) and the little woman worked wonderfully and the pair have kept me on the straight and narrow navigating Portland ever since.

All of which is a long way of saying that the hiking trip was not only great stress relief but also great motivation for getting things done large and small that have made life better ever since.

But I wasn’t quite finished with my carrots …

Amateur

Boolie — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 10:26:37 +0000

amateur |ˈamətər, -ˌtər, -ˌCHo͝or, -CHər|

noun
a person who engages in a pursuit, esp. a sport, on an unpaid basis.
• a person considered contemptibly inept at a particular activity: that bunch of stumbling amateurs.

adjective
engaging or engaged in without payment; nonprofessional: an amateur archaeologist | amateur athletics.
• inept or unskillful: it’s all so amateur!

DERIVATIVES
amateurism |-ˌrizəm|noun

ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French, from Italian amatore, from Latin amator ‘lover,’ from amare ‘to love.’

Apple’s built-in dictionary

The term amateur has both positive and negative connotations. When it comes to photography I love being an amateur, and I love it precisely because of the origins of the term: I get to photograph what I love.

While on the way back to my hotel in Yellowstone, I came across a bunch of photographers pulled off to the side of the road to photograph a herd of elk. I took a variety of pictures (including the picture at the top of my tribute to Steve Jobs) and was about to wrap up when I noticed a young elk bull down a ways from where everyone else was. I walked down to him and realized why no one else was photographing him: his antlers were stunted.

I have a soft spot for animals who have more to overcome, so I settled in to spend the rest of the dying light photographing him.

Whether due to diet or disease or genetics, the poor thing wasn’t exactly photogenic compared not only to the dominant bull but even to the other young bulls in the herd. He was mostly grazing but occasionally raised his head and sniffed the air, so I positioned my tripod so that if he raised his head again, his face would be set against the strip of yellow plants behind him. And not only did he raise his head again, but as if on cue he even looked right at me.

You’re beautiful to me, little one.

Little Bighorn

Boolie — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:53:02 +0000

My last day in Yellowstone was an amazing day, one I’ll remember for a long time. One of the highlights was a small herd of bighorn ewes and lambs alongside the southern trail to Mount Washburn.

Who Am I?

Boolie — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:32:43 +0000

Little are my horns,
but big is my name.

A Start at Goodbye

Boolie — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:09:50 +0000

I cried when he died.

I was at work in the middle of the afternoon when I realized I had been staring absent-mindedly into my monitor for quite some time. I was worn out, stretched too thin, and suddenly I just had to get out of the office. I went home.

As I walked in the door Ellie ran up to greet me as she always does, and she brightened my mood as she always does. Grinning from ear to ear, tail wagging, dancing in joy. We played until she tired. I went into my room and opened my laptop and learned that Steve Jobs passed away.

I’ve thought about Steve frequently the past fifteen years, for a number of reasons. Almost daily the past five, because of his Stanford speech. I don’t remember when I first read it, but it has haunted and inspired me ever since.

… for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford Commencement address

It was this quote that troubled me the most. While I like my job and the people I work with (I’ve been at my company for nearly 15 years, if that’s any indication), I’ve never loved my job the way Jobs clearly loved his. But until I can find a job that will pay me to spend my days hiking and tossing hedgehogs and handing out belly rubs, I guess I never will.

But I took his advice to heart in how I spend my free time, and if you look back through my hiking journals you’ll see these are the years when I started planning at least one big hiking trip per year. When I started getting up before dawn despite my night owl nature and heading to Ridgefield over and over and over again. When I stopped worrying over the cost and bought the big lens that has delighted me so. When I learned to keep an eye on those journals and watch for when the gap to my last outing grew too large, a warning sign I had slipped into a funk, and celebrating my favorite things through photography became a way to work myself out of it.

One of the ways a man I never met changed my life. I’ll miss you Steve.

Who Am I?

Boolie — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 23:44:25 +0000

Children hold me tight, to calm their fears at night.
But if I draw too close, adults are filled with fright.

Morning on the Blacktail Road

Boolie — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:20:31 +0000

I’ve driven Blacktail Plateau Drive, a one-way gravel road on the way between Mammoth Hot Springs and Tower-Roosevelt, a number of times on my visits to Yellowstone. The first time was one of the best, when I came across a couple of cubs high in the trees who slid down when their mother called them. This morning wasn’t too bad either, as a lone male pronghorn was resting in the grass in the early morning. The gate at the entrance has usually been locked at sunrise when I’ve been there that early, which is unfortunate, as there is no way to know without driving all the way out there.

Biding His Time

Boolie — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:04:21 +0000

This young bull was hanging out on the periphery of the harem of a much older bull. It kept a respectful distance and never sought to challenge the old fellow, despite his exhaustion at the end of the rut. The older bull was more concerned about bugling rivals further off than this youngster.

A Glimpse of Beauty

Boolie — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:17:04 +0000

This was my first (and so far only) sighting of a three-toed woodpecker. I came across this beautiful little creature several years ago in Yellowstone National Park. I didn’t think I’d have much chance at a picture, as despite the harsh light of the midday sun, little was making it through the canopy. I had left my tripod in the car so that I didn’t get too tired on the hike, but handholding the camera wasn’t easy in the low light. And the bird wasn’t sitting still, circling around the trunk and hammering into the bark, usually partially obscured by the many thin branches sticking out from the tree, often in poor lighting. While I don’t usually like strong light sources in the background, I really like them in this picture, the sunlight streaming through distant trees.

Holy Smokes Boolie, It’s Cold!

Boolie — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:06:28 +0000

I agree, Mr. Elk, I agree. We’ve had an unusual spate of sunny days the past couple of weeks. Sunny and cold days, although the clouds and rain returned this weekend and it should be back to normal this week.

I came across this bull elk late one evening on a snowy day in Yellowstone in the fall of 2007. I’m always a bit nervous driving in snow on my hiking trips since I’m traveling alone and not used to the winter conditions, but the snow wasn’t too heavy on this day (although a heavier storm arrived soon enough).

The Devil in Hot Shoes

Boolie — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:53:07 +0000

I’m not sure if I’m going to win NaNoWriMo this year.

I did well in 2005, starting out strong on day one and the words kept flowing until I met the goal of 50,000 words almost a week early. This year, while I’m making steady progress (click on the NaNo Stats tab to see a chart of my daily totals versus where I should be), at the moment I’m way behind.

Which has surprised me, as I know what I want to write.

I didn’t get off to a strong start, on Halloween I was laid low by a nasty headache and didn’t eat a single piece of candy, a first for me. So rather than start off writing at midnight, I went to bed instead, continued slow for the first few days and am still struggling to get back on track.

I thought I would get caught up yesterday, it was windy and pouring rain all day long, a good day to stay inside instead of doing yardwork. But Ellie was in a mood yesterday and wanted to play hedgehog all day long, so combined with another headache I didn’t write as much as I hoped.

And then there is the devil in hot shoes, the Canon 7D, that I ordered on Friday and which will be here tomorrow. It’s gone from Phoenix to Oakland and has already arrived in Portland (not that I’m checking frequently) and I’m resisting the urge to go down and raid the UPS depot. There is enough new stuff on the camera compared to my old ones that I’ll need to spend some time reading the manual, time I would have spent writing.

And of course there will be pictures to be taken, to play around with the new auto-focus and see how it compares to what I’m used to, as the AF has been a weak spot on past cameras. While the Internet is abuzz about it’s ability to track BIF’s — birds in flight — that’s not my biggest concern. As you may have noticed, for someone who photographs a lot of birds, I don’t often photograph them in flight as I don’t find the results to be that interesting, unless the wings are flared coming in for a landing.

I’m more interested in MIF’s — mammals in fields — or even ducks in the water. And low-contrast subjects, like a black bear on a cloudy day, where my past cameras have been fairly useless for AF.

So hopefully I can still find the time for 50,000 words, but what I really wanted was to get back into a writing groove after a long layoff, and win or lose that’s my ultimate goal.

Gaseous Emissions

Boolie — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:59:18 +0000

Why would I include a picture of a fumarole in a post about my dog?

Well, the other day Ellie added to her growing list of dietary adventures by eating a tub of margarine. That evening, Sam was sleeping on my lap as Ellie’s digestive system struggled to cope. Every so often he’d raise his head up and I knew his superior senses detected an incoming round that mine did not. Much like when I photograph the fumaroles and mud pots and geysers in Yellowstone, I was thankful that I have such a poor sense of smell.

First of the West

Boolie — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:39:46 +0000

I was first exposed to the noisy chatter of red squirrels while hiking in West Virginia when I lived back east. I would see them a few times more before moving to Oregon, where I wouldn’t see or hear them again until my first real trip to Yellowstone in 2004. On my first hike in my first few hours in the park, I came across this red squirrel near the beach of Shoshone Lake on the Shoshone Lake Trail. I’ve since seen them quite a bit in the park, but good pictures usually elude me, so this first picture remains my favorite of my pictures of red squirrels in Yellowstone.

Frosted Buffalo

Boolie — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:12:33 +0000

As I drove into Yellowstone in the fall of 2007, I stopped to photograph an elk bull that was sleeping in a meadow. As I got back to the car, I noticed this bison bull laying down across the Madison River, its back frosted white by the dirt it must have been wallowing in.

I Miss You

Boolie — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:16:58 +0000

As much as I like visiting Yellowstone in the fall when the park is less crowded and the fall colors arrive, I do miss the smaller mammals like the ground squirrels who must be hibernating already.

What Are Your Intentions?

Boolie — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:25:01 +0000

Bison are the easiest of the big mammals to see in most of Yellowstone, in some areas they hang out in large groups near the road. They generally leave people alone and seem docile enough that inevitably someone will get too close and end up getting hurt. It’s not so easy to underestimate them on the trails, where it’s hard to ignore their size and speed and of course the horns. You are in their domain and there is no car to retreat to.

This was one of a group of bulls that was coming in my direction on the Storm Point Nature Trail. While you are supposed to stay on the trails in Yellowstone, I decided to let the bulls have the right-of-way and stepped into the meadow. However, they soon veered off the trail themselves to go for a romp in the wallows so I was able to safely continue down the trail.

Bighorn Grab Bag

Boolie — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:05:02 +0000

A random assortment of pictures from my time with the bighorns.

Time for Goodbyes

Boolie — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:01:50 +0000

After I watched a group of bighorn rams for almost two hours, they stopped grazing and started up the path into the hills. It was getting late in the afternoon and now that they were moving, I didn’t want to stress them by trying to follow so I said my goodbyes and took the trail in the opposite direction, back towards the trailhead. It was interesting watching them decide to move, there were never any sudden movements, just a few that started slowly walking up the hill before stopping. The others grazed for a bit before following. They all stopped as a group on a small ridge where this one is standing now. After standing around for a few minutes, they continued walking up into the hills.

I bid them adieu and headed back to the car and started the long drive back home to Oregon. Instead of sampling three trails, I spent my last three hours on one and encountered what is still one of my favorite moments on the trails.

Wear & Tear

Boolie — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:58:55 +0000

This ram’s horns show the wear and tear that have accumulated over the years. Judging by the size of the horns, there appeared to be a range of years in the group. I wonder if the horns are like snowflakes, each unique, so that you could identify a ram based purely on its horns: how far they loop around, how thick they are, how closely spaced they are to the head, the damage patterns.

Regardless, they’re cool and I await the day genetic engineering will let me grow my own. Although it will make it hard to wear hats …

Earth Tones

Boolie — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:56:46 +0000

The northeastern part of Yellowstone extends into Montana and is quite different from most of the park. It has the lowest elevation in the park and so is most accessible during the winter. It is also drier here amongst the hills and grasslands, well-suited for bighorn sheep and pronghorn. The landscape is colored more subtly than the famous geothermal features elsewhere in the park, but this section has a beauty all its own, a beauty colored in oranges and browns and yellows and reds.

This was one of the younger rams in the group, his horns still haven’t grown full circle.