Part Four: Sights In and Around Pelican Creek Nature Trail at Yellowstone Lake

This photo is one of my favorites from the trip. Every time I look at it (it's my new desktop background), I feel transported to that beautiful place of wide open spaces, blue skies, and grey mountain backdrop. We had done so much exploring of geysers and mudpots and boiling aqua blue hot springs by this point that this slice of lovely nature and broad dramatic landscape was a soothing feast for the eyes. I shot this from the trail out over the lush meadows along Pelican Creek towards Yellowstone Lake and the mountains beyond.


I took this one just after the trail opened up from a forested area to the spectacular sight of Yellowstone Lake. The lake is about as big as Lake Tahoe, if I'm remembering correctly, but whereas Lake Tahoe is something like 1500 feet deep, Yellowstone Lake is about 200 feet deep. I couldn't capture the Lake in its entirety in any visually interesting way, so I decided to frame it in the edge of a beach and driftwood shot.



I love this shot of a small bison herd not far from the shores of Yellowstone Lake. Some of them may be responsible for a subsequent traffic jam that happened when they began crossing the road for fields on the other side, then stopped for no apparent reason. At first we didn't know what had caused our delay, but as we began to creep fowrard, we saw that a mama bison and two calves had just crossed the road enabling us to cautiously proceed, but a bull bison remained stubbornly blocking the other lane of cars. In fact he was looking at them like, "What are you going to do about it?" He was practically as big as the first car! As we drove on, I counted 147 cars at a standstill, but most of the drivers appeared unconcerned about the delay. People were shouting "Bison! Bison in the road!" to let them know what was going on, and that information seemed to make it all okay.