So Saturday morning we headed off down I-94 west, stopping in Dickinson for some lunch. One seemingly amazing thing about being this far north is that the light just seems to be good all the time. With the sun as relatively low as it is in the winter we get a bit more oblique angle, giving it just a bit more yellowish tint even at high noon. Something that I never really thought about before moving here.
We arrived at the Park entrance probably around 1 in the afternoon, with the sun fairly high in the sky and the temperature surprisingly pushing 75 degrees. If there was any wildlife around it seemed like a perfect day to go hiking around to try to find it.
One animal that I didn't really think about taking pictures of yet there are thousands of them in the park just so happens to be the Prairie Dog. While they are a completely normal animal to see in the wild for me, having grown up in Colorado, to a lot of other people they are a novelty that they have only ever seen in a Zoo. So we decided to stop by a fairly large "colony" I guess you would call it, and I crawled out towards some of the burrows in search of a really nice depth of field photo.
After having enough of these dumb little animals we continued on on the road around the park, a 20 mile or so drive which seems to take us around 4 hours to do whenever we go out there. There is an area with a hiking trail called the Coal Vein trail or something like that (I should really look it up, but it isn't too important here), and we decided to head up there to see if we could find some of the wild horses that live in and around the park. That is something that, even coming from Colorado, blows my mind. I have never seen horses in the Wild before, so that was really cool.
Pretty much 10 minutes later after leaving that little trailhead we run into a pack of cars stopped on the little road. More horses, of course. This time a larger group a bit farther away than the previous group.
As we were coming down the road, there just happened to be yet another Bison chilling by the road. I did actually get out of the car this time to take photos, since the angle from the road was awful. While I was maintaining a nice safe distance from the beast with my long lens, there was a group of older tourists that literally just stopped like 10 feet away and got out to take pictures with their iPhones. I guess that is my pennance for going to a park to take photos instead of to Montana Wilderness or something. This is probably the best one, with the tail there as its rutting around in the ground
Also Justine took a great little timelapse of our trip with her GoPro!
Kevin Fedde
Fedde Studios