No time of the year in Yellowstone is perfect.  Every season comes with trade-offs.  In winter, for example, you have to deal with extreme weather, but there’s lots of wildlife activity and very few people.  Summer is basically the opposite – the weather is great, but wildlife is tougher to find and the crowds are almost unbearable.  The trick for any season is to take advantage of the good while finding ways to minimize the bad.  In July and August, for me at least, that means avoiding the roads as much as possible and spending more time hiking.

This year there were several half-day hikes I was excited about, including some I’d never done before.  In late July I checked the first one off my list when I did a mostly off-trail climb up to an overlook just south of Mt. Norris, with an amazing view of Lamar Valley.  I’d been in the general area before but never quite that high.

 

 

Returning from the viewpoint I was almost all the way back to my car when a couple of hikers stopped in front of me, froze for a moment, and then began backing up very slowly.  Soon a subadult grizzly bear, which had been hidden behind a clump of tall bushes, came into view and trotted right up onto the trail, seemingly unconcerned by the presence of three humans.  The other hikers and I grouped together and retreated along the trail, but the grizzly decided to head the same direction.  Eventually we cut perpendicular to the bear’s path and gave it as wide a berth as possible, even though we were uncomfortably close.

 

 

At the end of July I did another hike that was new to me, this time along the part of Specimen Ridge that runs from Junction Butte to the Crystal Creek pullout.  It was fun to see all the petrified wood up there, and the slight haze caused by smoke from distant wildfires couldn’t hide the incredible views.

 

 

The morning after my Specimen Ridge hike I was outside our house with our little Maltese when I was surprised to see a black bear across the road.  I picked up the Maltese – knowing that our irrationally confident eight-pound dog would undoubtedly decide to charge the bear – and we watched from our deck as the bear crossed the road and ambled into our yard.  It was the closest I’d seen a bear to our house since we moved in three years ago.

 

 

For my next two hikes I had company.  My niece Kate had been wanting to check out Guitar Lake, and in early August we hiked up there with her boyfriend Ian and their dogs.  Guitar Lake is on National Forest land just underneath the peak of Amphitheater Mountain, and – while most of the trail is well-marked – it eventually gets a little sketchy.  Marie and I went there once a couple of years back and found the hike to be challenging and stressful, partly because of the elevation gain, partly because of the vanishing trail, and partly because at one point there’s a steep scramble up a rocky, exposed cliffside with 100-foot dropoffs.  But everyone made it there safely, including the dogs, and this time we found a viewpoint just north of the lake that let us look back on Silver Gate.

 

 

 

 

About a week later Marie joined me for a hike that started off upstream from the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone River, wound through some thermal areas, passed a couple of small lakes, and then looped back along Yellowstone Canyon.  Just before reaching the canyon we spotted a snowshoe hare on the trail, only the second time I’d ever been able to photograph one.

 

 

 

When I wasn’t doing a half-day hike I started most of my mornings with a shorter hike, usually up to Trout Lake.  Walking around Trout Lake is always great, but it amazed me that I never saw a single otter up there this spring or summer.

 

 

In mid-August I decided to mix things up with a morning hike along the Lamar River Trail instead of Trout Lake, which turned out to be a very fortunate decision.  After about a mile and a half I was passing a fallen tree when I heard a faint rustling sound.  I stopped to investigate and discovered a furry brown face peering up from the brush – a long-tailed weasel!  One of my favorite animals in the park to photograph.

 

 

 

I returned the next morning, hoping the weasel might still be around.  And sure enough, before too long the weasel popped out again.  Tiny and impossibly quick, it would sometimes dart out towards me before bolting back down a burrow or under a log – the classic mustelid mix of curiosity and wariness.

 

 

 

Marie and our neighbors Jill and Greg joined me the next morning, and the weasel was kind enough to make another appearance.

 

 

 

I had no luck the following morning, but after that I found the weasel (and often a badger, too) every day for over a week.  At some point I began to suspect there might be at least two different weasels – one with a brownish nose and more rounded eyes and one with a pinker nose and sharper facial features.  Then one morning I was photographing the weasel when a second weasel darted right past me.  Mystery solved – it was a family!  Later I began seeing a weasel with a few white hairs in the middle of its face, bringing the count up to at least three.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The weasels looked young, and when they stalked prey in the area – mostly birds and rodents – they seemed to have a lot to learn.  One morning I watched a weasel tackle a ground squirrel, sending both of them tumbling out of sight under a log.  The ground squirrel, screaming louder and longer than any rodent I’d ever heard, eventually managed to fight off the weasel and escape, seemingly uninjured.  I’m guessing that full-grown weasels don’t lose those kinds of battles very often.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What a thrill to be able to watch weasels and badgers so often, especially during a time when wildlife activity in the park tends to be relatively slow.  During the second half of August there were only three mornings when I couldn’t find at least one of the weasels, and I saw a badger about every other day.  The lack of otter sightings had been frustrating, and this was exactly the mustelid fix I needed.

 

 

 

 

Even when the weasels didn’t appear, watching a new day begin in Lamar Valley was always special.  My senses were on full alert.  Before sunrise I’d usually be shivering in near-freezing temperatures, and then by 10am it was warm enough that I’d be sweating.  The light and clouds shifted constantly.  On windless mornings the landscape was so silent that even the faintest sounds were amplified – the soft crunch of my hiking shoes on the grass, the thwick of a grasshopper leaping from one sagebrush to another, the piercing yip of a distant coyote.  When ravens flew by, the whoosh of their wings hit my ears like someone ripping heavy fabric.

 

 

In late August Marie flew to Ohio to visit family and friends, including both of her kids.  Our Maltese complained that I kept him insufficiently entertained while Marie was gone, but thankfully we managed to survive her absence without any major disasters.

 

 

 

I wasn’t so focused on hiking and weasels that I forget about Smudge and Daisy, the fox kits I spent a lot of time watching in late spring and early summer.  Towards the end of July I found them together by their den, happy and healthy and joyfully harassing each other.

 

 

Then about a week later I was driving home from a hike when I saw a dead fox on the road by Warm Creek.  My heart sank.  The fox looked very much like Smudge, but it was tough to tell for sure.  I’d already been wrong once before about Smudge being hit by a car, so I hoped I was wrong again.  I checked the den each morning for the next week or two, but neither Smudge nor Daisy made an appearance.  I fear the worst for Smudge, but it’s possible that he and Daisy are both fine and have just moved on from their den.  I still look for them every day.