In the Field Trip Report on Yellowstone National Park

November 05, 2023

Since I was a kid, I always wanted to go and visit Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. As I became a wildlife and nature photographer, this desire to go to Yellowstone grew. I have always wanted to capture images of the big mammals like the bison, elk, bear and moose. So, when I decided to make plans to go the Grand Teton National Park, we made plans for a short side trip to Yellowstone which would allow me to fulfill this childhood dream and see what I could capture with my camera at Yellowstone.

The following information is from my in the field notes from Yellowstone National Park.

In late September, my spouse and I flew to Denver, Colorado where we rented a vehicle and made the drive up to Wyoming. Our first morning in Wyoming was driving through the grasslands and sage brush fields as we made our way up to Yellowstone. During this drive, we came up onto a few fields with proghorns which was another species that I wanted to photograph on this trip.

We arrived at Yellowstone National Park and had allowed two full days for me to photograph as much of the park as possible. We stayed at Grant’s Village near the south entrance and mainly focused on Hayden Valley and to the south entrance area.

One of the species I was most interested in photographing was the bison. I was very happy that the bison was the first wildlife species that we observed and which I photographed at Yellowstone National Park. It was disappointing not to see more wildlife in those two days such as bear or coyotes. But I was still very happy with the images that I did capture, and it is always nice to add new wildlife species and landscapes/seascapes to my photography catalogue.

However, I captured hundred of images of the bison including bull bison sparring in a small heard. I still haven’t had time to go through all those bison images. Sometime soon, you might see another blog post of just bison pics that I captured.

In our exploration of Yellowstone we only drove around from the south entrance to the central area of the park which is the Hayden Valley area. While driving around the area of the park on the second day, we found an immature bald eagle sitting in a snag overlooking Yellowstone Lake. I was not necessarily expecting to photograph a bald eagle here in Wyoming since we have such a large amount of roosting eagles on the James River in Virginia. But nonetheless, I was able to capture a few decent images as the immature eagle decided to fly off the snag and circle around the Yellowstone Lake looking for its lunch.

My time at Yellowstone National Park was very short, but I was fortunate to see one nice sunset. For the majority of my trip out to Wyoming there were no beautiful and colorful skies but instead cloudy or foggy sunrises or sunsets. Here are a couple nice and peaceful photos that I took in the two evenings at Yellowstone Lake.

Even thought I spent only two days at Yellowstone National Park, I captured some great Yellowstone National Park photos especially of the bison. Overall, the wildlife species I saw include the bison, immature bald eagle, elk in the dark, and red-tailed hawk in the fog. Unfortunately, I was was unable to get to the northern section of Yellowstone due to such a short trip to Yellowstone as I wanted to spend most of my time on this trip to Wyoming at Grand Teton national Park.

So stay tuned for a blogpost coming up on the Grand Teton National park.

Thank you for reading my Field Notes Blog, and I hope you will share this post with others.

Let’s preserve and conserve our natural world.

All the best,

Lori

Copyright © 2023 Lori A Cash Conservation Photography, LLC