One of the most popular activities in the Tetons and Yellowstone is shooting wildlife--with a camera, that is.
Here's how it works.
You drive in your car along the designated highways (best at dawn or dusk) where there are open plains, or "flats." The National Park Service has provided convenient look-outs at regular intervals. A good indication that animals are in the region is a herd of humans armed with cameras at a lookout, or even just in the middle of the road.
I saw an impressive array of animals this way: bison, elk, a pelican, pheasant, pronghorn deer, coyote etc. but after the excitement of seeing a few wild animals, an uncomfortable feeling settled in. Why was I so intent on "capturing" these animals on film? And how wild were they if a city girl like me could get close enough to shoot them?
One time, we pulled into a parking lot and there was the tell-tale sign of a crowd. Sure enough, an elk with a big rack of antlers was feeding nearby. Soon a crowd appeared, and a disembodied voice came across a loud-speaker. GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO YELLOWSTONE PARK. PLEASE GET AWAY FROM THE ELK.
Sheepishly, I retreated to the car. I was now officially part of the problem. A few moments later, I looked over across the sidewalk, and there was the elk, only a few yards away, licking a bicycle seat, right in front of our parking space. Now, he was fair game and I grabbed my chance to get in some shots:
In The Abstract Wild, Jack Turner, a philosopher turned mountaineer observes that our experience of the wild is becoming increasingly mediated: by guidebooks, photographic reproductions, our own cameras, and even the National Parks system itself! That prompted me to put down my camera, and just observe.
Indeed, my most satisfying encounter with animals turned out to be the ones that were accidental and unmediated. Like the time an elk surprised me in the woods and we just stared at each other for a few moments in mutual curiosity.
Truth be told, the animals in the park didn't seem all that wild, in the sense they were apparently unfazed by the presence of humans. And yet the photos above were taken only a stone's throw from the trail where a tourist was killed by a bear just a few weeks earlier. It begged the question, how wild was this wilderness?
The prospect of encountering a bear was one possibility that did put the wild in wilderness, so I began to hope that we would actually see one, at least at a distance. When we finally did catch some bear, it was actually quite a gentle scene, at least from our perspective behind the binoculars. A baby cub had climbed a tree and its legs were dangling. Mama was waiting at the bottom. The cub made its way down, and then there were two cubs, both feeding and playing with Mama; tumbling and rolling...she was licking them with her gigantic tongue.
No, our wildest experience was not to be had in the company of bears.
Sick of the crowds at midday, we decided to try our luck at dawn and so we rose at 4:00 a.m. to look for wildlife in the Lamar Valley in the northeastern part of the park. At first, it was still so dark that we couldn't see anything beyond our headlights. Eventually as the horizon lightened, we were able to make out some hazy outlines including a gigantic four-legged creature lumbering towards us on the road. It was hard to even identify what kind of animal this in the morning haze. Could it be a bear? a grizzly even? Nope, bison. Alpha.
Suddenly we noticed about 200 pairs of eyes shining like an army of flashlights in front of us. We had stumbled into a herd crossing the road. This was both exhilarating and a bit disconcerting. After all, this was what we had come for, wasn't it? On the other hand, we had heard that more people are actually injured by bison each year than by bears. Bison can go from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds and can put their horns right through a car. And we were seriously outnumbered. The tidy park boundaries between observers and observed had been blurred. There was no question that the bison owned the road and there wasn't a whole lot we could do other than wait.
So, we watched the herd do what bison do--feed their young, call to each other, form lines and very slowly meander from one side of the road to the other. Eventually we gingerly made our way through the herd, with a new respect for the wild and our place in it.
