Into Yellowstone...

At last we arrived at the singular purpose of this particular overseas trip, an extended visit to the famous Yellowstone National Park in Winter as part of a photographic outing by National Geographic Expeditions. Yellowstone became the world's first National Park (#2 being Royal National Park in Sydney) when, on 01 March 1872, President Ulysses S Grant signed it into law. The roughly rectangular park is large, at 9,000sq.km, and sits in the northwest corner of Wyoming. Maybe for political reasons, the park overlaps slightly into two other states, Montana and Idaho, and indeed, the only winter entrance is in Montana.

In a heavy snowfall, this sign marks the entry to the park near Gardiner MT.

Our expedition (National Geographic love that word) started at Bozeman airport at a grizzly bear statue (wooden, gratefully, not a taxidermist product). There were 16 guests (all Americans except for us two) plus two guides, both conveniently called Drew. Drew Thate was our Expedition Leader, and Drew Rush was our NatGeo photographer. From Bozeman, we travelled to the park via Paradise Valley (where our Leader lives) in two very luxurious and spacious Mercedes buses which could also negotiate the only park road open in winter which runs for 85km about 10km inside the northern boundary, mostly in Wyoming, from the North Entrance to the Northeast Entrance, both entrances being in Montana.

Heavy snow falling doesn't stop these elk grazing on the edge of Gardiner.

Our group travelled in two of these Mercedes minibuses.

The imposing Roosevelt Arch marks the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner MT. Its cornerstone was laid down by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. An inscription "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People" confirms the fundamental purpose of this, the world's first National Park.

Our accommodation for this phase was in a motel in the town of Gardiner immediately outside the North Entrance, and our room looked right over the gushing Yellowstone River, which (although flowing north through the park), eventually winds up in the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. We must have been on the east side of the continental divide! Inside the park, at Mammoth Hot Springs, there is a splendid looking hotel which is NatGeo's preference, but it was undergoing major renovations. Come back in 2020 if you want to stay here, by the look of it.

Our motel in Gardiner while the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel is being renovated.

A few vehicles making their way along the only cleared road in Yellowstone.

Subzero temperatures greeted us on Yellowstone's high plateau.

This road runs from Gardiner, through Mammoth Hot Springs crosses the Blacktail Deer Plateau, then at Tower-Roosevelt it drops down into the Lamar Valley and along Soda Butte Creek until it passes the Northeast Entrance to the tiny town of Cooke City. It was a spectacular drive in almost non-existent traffic and along the way we saw small herds of American Elk, Pronghorn, Longhorned Sheep and the odd bison and distant moose, not to mention glorious mountain scenery.

Bison burrow through soft snow in the hunt for meagre nutrition, thus the snowy visage!

Seen through the softening haze of a heavy snowfall, these pronghorn deer are among 5,000 in Yellowstone. Their main defence is that they are the fastest land animal in North America.

As close as we got to a moose in Yellowstone, Bull moose shed their antlers for winter to help them conserve energy.

Heavy snow on rocks in Yellowstone's Soda Butte Creek resemble marshmallows.

A distant mountain goat was visible in this field using a high-powered telescope, but you can't see it in this shot through a 560mm lens.

The slopes of Barronette Peak exhibit some very pretty icefalls.

Relatively rare (only about 160 inside Yellowstone) but easy to find, bighorn sheep enjoy grazing on steep terrain.

Elk (cervus canadensis) are Yellowstone's most numerous mammal, with up to 20,000 in summer, but most winter outside the park, leaving less than 5,000 behind. These are females - bulls have antlers.

Cooke City is a tiny town (pop 140). Apparently it had great ambitions to be a railway stop, but that development never eventuated. In winter, the only access is via Yellowstone, being hemmed in by mountains and all other roads are snowbound and uncleared. We saw Cooke City to be very popular as a destination for snow-mobilers, and we had lunch there at a joint called Buns N Beds. Our "crowd" was obviously expected, but it nearly overwhelmed this tiny place, and the very helpful server really had her work cut out for her, what with a lot of special instructions for the chef.

Downtown Cooke City is a very snowy place.

We had a real pleasure and that was to visit the very cute cabin and studio of Dan Hartman, a renowned photographer and videographer who earns major commissions from National Geographic and BBC, for example. Dan, and his wife Cindy, live in Silver Gate MT, a tiny tiny town on the north eastern border of the park, and made a presentation to us in their cosy living room on his experiences filming rare and elusive wildlife in Yellowstone (his own backyard) and elsewhere. Dan has mastered the techniques of identifying key locations and installing fixed cameras, coming back for them later, sometimes much later, to see what he had captured. Only a small fraction of his footage has ever been actually aired by his employers, and he showed us amazing scenes which had never been seen publically. The Hartman's have a bird-hide, and there we saw plenty of Clark's Nutcrackers and a few Hairy Woodpeckers, and got nice close-ups of each.

The path leading to Dan Hartman's house and gallery.

Clark's nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana), or a woodpecker crow, is a common high-altitude bird in the Rocky Mountains, and is particularly keen on seeds from whitebark pine which it helps to propogate.

In his living room, Dan showed us examples of his extraordinary photography and videography.

Common in deciduous forests throughout North America, the hairy woodpecker (Leuconotopicus villosus) lives on insects, fruit, berries and nuts.

After a long day exploring the northern fraction of Yellowstone. To go deeper into the park, we would have to trade in our Mercedes buses.

More Yellowstone images here.