Trip Reports

One thing I like about guiding in Yellowstone National Park is that every day is different. There are some days where we have to work hard to find wildlife, and there are other days where Yellowstone smiles upon us and decides to share her bounty at every bend in the road. This was one of…

The howl of a wild wolf cuts right through to the soul. It is a haunting and beautiful sound, full of ancient wisdom, yearning, passion, and sorrow. I have heard that call many times, usually from a great enough distance that there is a few-second lag between seeing the howl in our spotting scopes and…

It was cold, dark, and early when I picked up the mixed group for day one of four we would have together. People in this group came from all over: a couple people from the Midwest; England was represented along with Canada; and someone even traveled all the way from Australia! They were strangers, soon…

“Owl!” I heard excited voices calling from the front of the snow coach. It was a beautiful December morning on the road between Mammoth Hot Springs and Norris Geyser Basin in Yellowstone, and I was in the back seat of a snowcoach – a tricked-out van with massive low-pressure tires for navigating the snowed-over roads…

Photo courtesy of Yellowstone Wild Guide Evan Watts / Watts Wildlife Photography. Sparse clouds caught the orange glow of the rising sun as we drove east. It was a cool, damp morning in mid-July, and as we made our way into the Lamar Valley, the sun rose just enough to reveal the gentle, rolling slopes…

One of the last days of June and the dash tells me it’s 38° F at 6 a.m. Awesome! That is exactly what I want on a morning drive to the center of a volcano. Geyser steam hangs thick in the air like cream of mushroom soup and Yellowstone is virtually deserted. As we drive…

As a naturalist guide in Yellowstone, one of the most coveted sightings as far as wildlife is concerned is to catch a fox hunting—or “mousing”—for its prey. However, because of foxes’ tendency to be more active at night, this sighting can prove to be a difficult challenge. On an early Sunday morning in June I…

Day after day, month after month, year after year, familiar faces show themselves in Yellowstone. For some, this means people: the wolf watchers, those individuals with the largest spotting scopes of all that we’ve grown to love and admire throughout time; the geyser geeks in their floppy sun hats, letting us know when our favorite…

May is a fabulous time to view grizzly bears in Yellowstone!  In this video a mother grizzly and her two 2.5-year-old cubs play and wrestle in a small snow patch on Yellowstone’s famed Northern Range. This level of somewhat violent play may be the beginnings of mom pushing the young ones out on their own….

Rob Harwood – Workshop Instructor Day 1 Winter storms, howling wind, beautiful light, and snowy bison….this year’s multi-day winter photo workshop had it all! We set out from Bozeman on the first day with forecasts of heavy snow and wind in the coming week, which a normal person might be nervous about. But we’re not…