I lay on my back and stared up at the sky.  Not flat on my back – I was wearing a backpack, which angled me slightly to my right side – but definitely horizontal.  The stars that flashed across my vision had dissipated.  No bones seemed to be broken.  Actually it was quite peaceful to just lay there watching the clouds drift by.

What had just happened felt like a wipeout in the truest sense of the word.  It was as if an invisible giant had wiped his arm across the frozen ground in an arc that passed directly through my ankles.  Only it wasn’t a giant’s arm that sent my legs flying into the air, but a careless step onto a small patch of black ice by the Lamar River.

Wiping out was not a novel experience for me.  In the recent past I’d stumbled down the stairs to our garage, tripped over a fallen tree while looking for owls, and taken an awkward spill on a flat, dry trail – among many other mishaps.  I can be a little clumsy.

Still, I wondered if the universe might be sending me a message with this particular wipeout.  Over the previous couple of weeks, as I made my morning drives into Lamar Valley, I’d indulged myself with the idea that – for the first time since Marie and I moved to Silver Gate almost five years ago – I was finally starting to feel like I knew what I was doing.  Not in the sense of life in general, but in relationship to Yellowstone – the landscape, the wildlife, the people, my photography.  I conjured one example after another of progress I’d made, all the embarrassing gaps in my knowledge and experience that were no longer quite so glaring.

Here, for instance, is the best black bear photo I managed to take when Marie and I visited Yellowstone in 2010:

 

 

And here are a few of my recent black bear photos:

 

 

I’d like to think that my knowledge of local wildlife has made similar strides.  A month or two after Marie and I moved to Silver Gate, a former work colleague who was visiting Yellowstone with her husband and a friend asked me to show them around.  As we were watching wolves through a scope in Lamar Valley, my colleague’s friend captured a video of a weasel bounding around in the sage.  “What animal is this?” she asked, pointing to the video.  I wasn’t sure!  Even now I’m ashamed and horrified by that memory.  These days weasels are among my favorite animals to photograph.

 

 

Just this past spring, I was watching a fox den with my photographer friend Max when a familiar drumming noise filled the air.  It was a sound I’d heard in Yellowstone hundreds of times before, and for some reason I always wrote it off as a big construction machine engine starting up in the distance.  “Ah, there goes a grouse,” Max said casually.  A grouse!  I was vaguely aware that ruffed grouse use their wings to make a drumming noise as part of their mating display, but – idiotically – I’d never connected the dots.

As with Max solving the engine noise mystery, I owe most of the progress I’ve made over the years to help from people who know more than I do.  Owls are another good example.  When Marie and I first moved to Silver Gate, I’d never even seen a pygmy owl, a saw-whet owl, or a boreal owl before, and – more importantly – I didn’t appreciate how challenging and rewarding it can be to search for and photograph owls of all kinds.  If my photographer friends Nick, Jort, and Todd hadn’t generously opened my eyes, I’d still be just as clueless.

 

 

And of course our friends and neighbors Jill and Greg helped Marie and me so much as we settled into Silver Gate that we’ll never be able to repay them.  They explained how things worked, introduced us around, showed us all kinds of cool places, and patiently answered (and continue to answer) an endless stream of questions.

Don’t get me wrong, though – what I don’t know about Yellowstone still completely dwarfs the little bits I’ve managed to piece together.  Apparently I still don’t even understand basic wolf etiquette.  Driving by Round Prairie early one morning in mid-March, I spotted a black wolf surprisingly close to the road.  A few cars were stopped and I stopped too, partly to get photos but also because I thought the wolf might want to cross the road.  Normally it’s against the rules to just stop like that, but making room for wildlife can be an exception, and sometimes park employees will block traffic to help wolves cross.

 

 

 

This time, however, I read the scene wrong.  Taylor – one of Yellowstone’s Wolf Project technicians – raced over to yell at us to keep moving.  It turned out there were several wolves around, all pups from the Junction Butte pack, and they seemed much too comfortable by the road for Taylor’s liking.  She suspected that people had been throwing food to them from their cars, and I heard that she’d already hazed the pups with a paintball gun in an effort to help reverse the troubling habituation.  “She went all John Wick on their ass,” one bystander commented.

 

 

 

Obviously I still make mistakes, mishandle situations, and remain ignorant of lots of things I should know.  So maybe my wipeout was the universe’s way of reminding me not to get all puffed up because I can finally identify a weasel.  You may think you’ve come pretty far, the universe scolds, but you’re always just one poorly-chosen step away from watching your feet sail into the air.  As with many areas of life, I guess, it’s an ongoing challenge to find the right perspective.

 

 

When I wiped out, I’d been walking along the Lamar River because I was searching for the otter family that made some memorable appearances there this winter.  I found the otters three mornings in a row in mid-February (right after I returned from the Galapagos), but conditions weren’t great for photos and I was frustrated that I failed to spot them again before a streak of oddly warm weather melted most of the ice and snow in Lamar Valley.

 

 

 

 

In the second half of March, thanks to the same uncharacteristically warm temperatures, I was able to hike a few short trails that are usually covered in snow for another month.  I checked out Trout Lake (still frozen over), Calcite Springs (no black bears yet, unsurprisingly), the Lamar River Trail (didn’t see any badgers or weasels), and the start of the Specimen Ridge trail (was amazed to find a marmot out already).

 

 

In late March I went with Marie to see her horse May.  This winter May has been in Butte, Montana, where she’s been getting some training from the same woman who runs the Horse Camp that Marie has enjoyed so much.  I didn’t ride this time, but it was great to see May again.

 

 

Toward the end of March I spotted my first grizzly bear of the year on an elk carcass across the creek from the Footbridge pullout.  Given the springlike weather, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing many more bears in the near future.