February 2024 Yellowstone trip
Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2024 1:55 pm
I went to the park with a couple photographer friends for 5 days, Feb. 5-9, stayed in Gardiner and drove the Gardiner-Cooke City road a lot. The weather was warm and there wasn't more than a few inches of snow on the ground, so we did a lot of hiking as well. Didn't even use the snow shoes we brought, being able to get away with snow boots instead.
The trip started out slow. The warmer weather meant no sub-zero temps and heavy snow to force the animals down to the road. But it picked up as the days went on.
Got a couple nice bull elks near Lava Creek, a bachelor herd of bighorn rams on the Old Yellowstone Road, foxes near Baronette and Pebble Creek, bull moose at Pebble--usually three, but once there were four, though they were far away. Also plenty of coyotes and saw two different wolf packs, the Rescue Creek pack at the self-guided trailhead on Blacktail and another that I first thought was the Shrimp Lake pack on a hillside between Soda Butte Cone and Trout Lake trailhead, but it had 8 wolves and from what I was told, Shrimp Lake only has four. Didn't get good pics of either one, the Rescue Creek pack because they were two miles away and the others because it was in a driving snowstorm.
But the highlight of the trip came on the next to last day when we found the northern pygmy owl people had been seeing and got about an hour with it, watching it hunt and catch a vole. Awesome experience, first pygmy I've ever seen.
The trip started out slow. The warmer weather meant no sub-zero temps and heavy snow to force the animals down to the road. But it picked up as the days went on.
Got a couple nice bull elks near Lava Creek, a bachelor herd of bighorn rams on the Old Yellowstone Road, foxes near Baronette and Pebble Creek, bull moose at Pebble--usually three, but once there were four, though they were far away. Also plenty of coyotes and saw two different wolf packs, the Rescue Creek pack at the self-guided trailhead on Blacktail and another that I first thought was the Shrimp Lake pack on a hillside between Soda Butte Cone and Trout Lake trailhead, but it had 8 wolves and from what I was told, Shrimp Lake only has four. Didn't get good pics of either one, the Rescue Creek pack because they were two miles away and the others because it was in a driving snowstorm.
But the highlight of the trip came on the next to last day when we found the northern pygmy owl people had been seeing and got about an hour with it, watching it hunt and catch a vole. Awesome experience, first pygmy I've ever seen.