A blur of dark motion on the snow revealed itself to be a large bull elk running parallel to the road at full speed.  I pulled over to watch.  The elk bolted past my car and cut across the road before vanishing downslope.  Seconds later another dark blur:  a lone black wolf following in the elk’s path, its heavy breathing casting icy puffs into the morning air.  Pausing briefly on a low hill, the wolf granted me a fleeting moment of eye contact before bounding across the road in pursuit of the elk.

Wow…  It happened so quickly there was nothing left to see when I finally thought to reach for my camera.  The beginning of winter in Yellowstone tends to be relatively slow in terms of wildlife sightings, and I felt extremely fortunate to have stumbled across such a memorable scene only a week after returning from our our Madagascar trip.

I drove into the park almost every morning in November and December, as usual, and saw plenty of winter wildlife – bison, elk, coyotes, foxes, wolves, moose (although far fewer than expected), bighorn sheep, eagles, and even a pygmy owl.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the animals I most wanted to see – otters, weasels, pine martens, or any other mustelids – eluded me.  Thankfully I’d banked up some good mustelid time before we left for Madagascar.  The weasels and badgers I’d seen out on the Lamar River Trail in August remained active through the first week of September.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I often hiked up to Trout Lake during the second half of September, hoping to spot an otter but striking out.  One morning, however, I was thrilled to find a western tiger salamander, the first I’d ever seen in Yellowstone.  And towards the end of September I ran across a group of four bull moose that play-fought and chased each other into the water like rowdy children before charging up the hill towards Buck Lake.

 

 

 

 

Other than the wolf chasing the elk, my most memorable wildlife encounter in November was – oddly enough – a raccoon by our neighbor’s shed.  Despite being common in so many places, raccoons are extremely rare here.  This was only the second one I’d ever seen in or around Yellowstone.  Rocky the Rogue Raccoon apparently visited many other yards and porches in Silver Gate and Cooke City, and there was speculation that it might have been trapped somewhere else (e.g., Cody) and released here.  I’m really hoping it finds enough food to survive the winter.

 

 

Craving some city time, Marie rented a place in Bozeman from mid-November to mid-December.  We gathered there for a great Thanksgiving with Marie’s son Aidan and her daughter Audrey, and our niece Kate and her boyfriend Ian (who both live nearby).

 

 

Sometimes I don’t see any notable wildlife on my morning drives in Yellowstone, but the scenery is always spectacular.  The light and weather change constantly and every morning is different.  Often my time in the park feels the way some people describe attending church – a heightened sense of awe and gratitude, an awareness that we’re part of something greater, a chance to forget about day-to-day issues and grapple with bigger questions.

 

 

I look for animals, I marvel at the landscape, I listen to music and podcasts, I stop to talk to other park regulars, I daydream.  With Marie in Bozeman for a month, introverted Solo Rob got lost in his head even more than usual on those drives.  Something that’s been going on for a while now happened more often, an upwelling I don’t consciously direct.  My mind begins sifting through the events of my whole life, piece by piece from childhood to the present, in an attempt to weave all the disparate, contradictory threads into some sort of coherent narrative.  We all love stories, of course, and I think most of us want to interpret the unfolding of our life as a story that makes meaningful sense, even if we have to fool ourselves a little to see it that way.  For whatever reason, winter mornings in Yellowstone seem to be a perfect backdrop for that kind of self-indulgence.