12 mile hike

My wife and I decided to go do one of the longer hikes in Teddy Roosevelt National Park. According to our math it turned out being just around 12 miles total, including a couple detours to get around herds of bison. 

Anyways, it was a long hot hike, but I'm still glad that we did it, since it was fun seeing parts of Teddy Roosevelt National Park that we hadn't seen before, parts that you can't see from the road or some of the easier hikes. If we were to do it again, though, we would have each brought another 32oz water bottle at least, because it was a lot hotter than the forecast was saying. We didn't run out of water, but having some extra buffer would have been nice.

For camera gear I brought along my Fujifilm X-Pro2 + 16-55 f/2.8 and my Graphite X-T1 + 100-400 f/4.5-5.6. Two cameras and two lenses made it nice, because I didn't have to change lenses in the dust. I took around 400 total photos and didn't have to change my battery once in either camera, which was great! People keep saying mirrorless cameras have terrible battery life, but I'm just not seeing it.

I'll start off the post here with my favorite picture of the whole hike, taken at a nice little oasis almost amongst the scrub brush and juniper. 

I'll try to keep the rest of these photos in approximate chronological order, and there won't be too much text in here since the photos tell it pretty well. 

This next bit is the awesome spot where I took the first photo in the post. Just a little grove in a little muddy pond. 

We did start getting some clouds a bit later in the afternoon, but nothing that really helped with the glaring sun. It did make for some nice photos when one went over the sun though, however briefly. 

After we hit the road, about 2/3 of the way through the hike, I decided to put my camera away and just focus on hiking, so there aren't too many more photos. We did see one whole Pronghorn Antelope, though, so I pulled my camera out for the one significant bit of wildlife we saw! 

Decent. Nothing spectacular but I am glad that we saw some semblance of wildlife, since TRNP has some of the greatest variety of any National Park out there.

I'll finish off with one of my favorite photos I took of my wife while we were hiking. 

Thanks for reading!

​Kevin