We started off looking for the Lamar wolves again, and found three of them. One was named “Twin”, the Alpha Male of the Lamar pack. Twin set the route and walked ahead of the rest. If the coast was clear, he would stop and call for the rest of his pack to come.
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| “Twin” — the Alpha Male of the Lamar pack |
Also saw two coyotes
and one eagle
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I am staying in a small town just outside the park gate. I thought my room would be your basic motel room, but it turned out to be essentially a one-bedroom apartment with full kitchen and separate bedroom!
Herds of elk wander through the town daily. I saw one elk climb the step to the porch of a house and rub his nose on the front door. Once an elk came right up to me, clearly expecting food. Another time as I came out of a pub. an elk was just standing there in front of me. He froze and I froze. We both stood there staring at each other. I think it was the same elk from before. He started to approach me again. I told him “no food for you!” and walked away.
The town has two gas stations and just a few stores. No Starbucks or other chain fast food places.
Limited bison hunting is allowed outside the park. One afternoon I saw bison hunters unloading a wagon load of bison meat.
My wolf guide Bonnie picked me up at 6:30 am. This will be our schedule for the next four days. The wolves in Yellowstone are divided into packs. There are about a half dozen packs in the park and they compete with each other for prey and territory.
We headed straight for Lamar Valley where wolves had been sighted recently. Even so, wolf sightings are never guaranteed and I was prepared for a long wait. However almost immediately we saw two yearling pups from the Lamar pack!
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| “Big T”, a yearling female from Lamar Pack |
The backstory we got from other wolf watchers was that the Lamar pack had made a kill but the stronger Molly pack drove them away forcing them to leave the kill. During the retreat two of the Lamar pups got left behind; they were too weak to keep up with the rest of the pack. One was named “Big T” (because of the T-shaped pattern on her chest). Unfortunately she has a bad case of mange (a skin parasite that affects dogs and wolves); you can see she’s lost a lot of fur.
They were both resting under trees in the distance, about a mile away. They were barely visible as tiny specks to the naked eye. You needed powerful binoculars to see them clearly, and I had to break out my huge telephoto lens right off the bat!
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| Big Horn Sheep |
We didn’t see any more wolves the rest of the day, so I took pictures of some other animals included Big Horn sheep, Mountain Goats, and a coyote.
[Anyone reading this blog? Then please leave a comment below and let me know!]
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| Mountain Goat |
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| Lone Coyote |
From the highway to the lodge where I’ll be staying during my Wolf Expedition, I saw a sign for Grizzly Bears! so of course I stopped to check it out 🙂
From experience, I know these kinds of places can turn out to be rather cheesy. However I was pleased to discover it was legit, not cheesy. It turned out to be a grizzly bear rescue facility, where bears in captivity that are mistreated or otherwise in unfortunate situations that cannot be released into the wild, are taken in and allowed to live out their lives in relative comfort.
There is a reasonably large play area for the bears which is also the viewing area. The bears are anywhere from 20′ to 100′ away from you, with no bars of fence between you and the bears (instead there is a deep ditch they cannot climb or jump across), so an ideal photo-taking opportunity. I had been to a similar facility in Oregon for wild cats such as tigers and leopards, but they were all behind chain link fences, which ruined any photos.
During my visit “Jake” and Maggi” were out in the play area. Seeing them was a wonderful experience, I definitely got the feeling they were happy and being well cared for.
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| “Jake” – a handsome-looking 10 year-old male grizzly. Had I encountered a grizzly this close in the wild, I likely would not have survived it! |
One question many people asked is why are the bears not hibernating? Well these bears were neutered to prevent them from reproducing (they want to reduce the number of bears in captivity, not increase it). And this apparently prevents them from hibernating.
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| Jake posing |
Besides Jake and Maggi they have 3 more grizzlies including the most famous one, a 1000 lb behemoth named Brutus.
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| Jake and Maggi |
Can we humans learn anything from grizzly bears? Here’s how Casey (owner of this facility) answered that:
Insight from Brutus: If it is physically possible, then it is done. If
not, it isn’t. After weighing a boulder in at one ton, we used a tractor
to lift it to place a piece of salmon under it. Soon after, Brutus
caught the scent of the salmon and walked to the boulder. In one swift
move, he pushed the boulder to the side and happily devoured the salmon.
Then it dawned on me as I stood next to my friend. He doesn’t worry
much; he is not handicapped by his mind. If his body
isn’t capable of doing it, then that is his only limitation. He does not
sit there and contemplate, or make excuses; he just does all he can.
Then goes and takes a nap in the sunshine. How great would it be if we
could all live that way? –Casey Anderson
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I arrived in Montana a day early before my Wolf Expedition started in earnest. I took advantage of the extra time by visiting the small but excellent Museum of the Rockies. I was glad to see the dinosaur exhibit is still curated by Jack Horner, the first paleontologist I met and probably the most famous paleontologist in the world (Sam Neill’s character in Jurassic Park was based on Jack). I first met him at UC Berkeley for a dedication ceremony for the new T. rex specimen display on campus that Jack had discovered. I did some work helping one of Jack’s graduate students to excavate Maiasaur nesting sites in Northern Montana, and had met several others of Jack’s students, who have gone on to become reknowned paleontologists in their own right.
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| Museum of the Rockies |
Jack was the first to prove that dinosaurs built nests (like birds) and cared for their young (like mammals), feeding and protecting them for years after birth, and did not abandon them like many lizards and snakes do today. I feel honored and fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet Jack and chat with him several times. On exhibit were some beautiful sculptures by Matt Hall:
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| Deinonychus in attack mode. |
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| This reconstruction is based on the latest research showing it had feathers like birds, not scales like a lizard or snake |
“For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”
==Rudyard Kipling
Few creatures evoke such strong emotions as the wolf. Wolves are: beautiful, mysterious, elusive, intelligent, and widely misunderstood.
I love wolves. So I created my own wolf expedition. The seeds of this expedition go back a few years to the last time I was in Yellowstone Park. Then, I saw almost all of the wildlife Yellowstone has to offer, except wolves. I decided I want to come back here again some time just for the wolves. In the meantime I did some research on the Yellowstone wolves. I found out the best time to see the wolves is in the winter, when they are the most active (due to less competition from hibernating bears). Wolves used to roam the area for thousands of years, before they were almost completely wiped out by man. A program to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone was initiated in 1995 and almost immediately it had a huge (positive) impact on the park (for a more detailed explanation of how exactly the wolves helped, see this fantastic 5 minute documentary). This made it even more interesting to me and I wanted to see these wolves in particular. So I hired a wolf expert guide and set up a 4-day wolf expedition with just the two of us. We would track the various wolf packs around the park every day. My main goal is to try to obtain some good photos and video of the elusive wolves.
Preparation
There is deep snow right now in Yellowstone, and temperatures will be in the 20s (F). Having been to the high Arctic three times in the past six months, I already have the clothing covered. But the wolves are rather shy of humans (for good reason: many are shot and killed by ranchers who live outside the park), and they can be seen only from a distance. Therefore I know I will need a super-telephoto capability. A few days before before the trip I ordered a new lens. This lens is so huge that it requires its own suitcase!
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| Humongous telephoto lens! |
I am really excited about this trip!
[Anyone reading this blog? Then please leave a comment below and let me know!]
Back in Copenhagen after 2 days in Malmo, Sweden. I checked into a different hotel (my fourth one in CPH) that was near the train station. I was given room #09. The elevator had a button labeled “S” which was the ground floor with the lobby. Just to the right of it was another button, also identically labeled “S”. This was one floor up from the ground floor, and contained the “0” rooms (01 – 09) including my room. Above those were buttons 1 through 4 for the floors above that. This means that the floor labeled “1” was really floor 2 (Europeans start numbering floors with 0 for the ground floor), or floor 3 in American terms. Floor “S” was both floor 0 and floor 1 (floor 1 & 2 in American) I’m not sure what “S” stands for, but why have TWO “S” floors, especially when they are physically different floors. It’s as if my floor, the zero rooms floor, was added later as an afterthought, and squeezed into a space between two existing floors. Something like the “floor 7½” in Being John Malkovich. Or maybe I just stepped into… the Twilight Zone??
I’m now in Denmark, the land of the Little Mermaid, Existentialism, and Bluetooth (An ancient King of Denmark was named “Bluetooth”).
For me personally though, when I think of Copenhagen I think of Niels Bohr and his formulation of Quantum Mechanics. After a long nap, I went walking to explore the area near my hotel. Sure enough, I didn’t walk more than 3 minutes before encountering a bust of Niels Bohr.
The weather is nice, warm enough to eat outdoors and most restaurants have outdoor seating. The restaurants are good, but expensive. A seafood linguini cost me 240 DKK (about $40).
After dinner I went to a Jazz festival; heard an amazing group called the “Portico Quartet”. Not your typical jazz group, they were quite fresh and innovative. I might describe their style as “Jazzy Soundscapes”, with extensive use of loopers and other special effects.
At O’Hare, on my way to Copenhagen! That’s where I start my trip to some parts of Scandanavia, and the UK.
I’m back home now and I’ve had a chance to process and reflect upon my trip. I can now write this blog entry giving a summary of my trip and final thoughts. I wrote 55 blog entries for this trip (including this one), but those were only some of the highlights. It still doesn’t cover the total range of experiences I’ve had.
This has been a truly epic journey for me, exactly four months long and the longest trip I’ve ever taken. It’s definitely one of the best if not the best trip I’ve ever taken. In fact I run out of superlatives when trying to describe it to friends and find it difficult to convey just how great this trip really was. I saw so many new things, went to so many new places, met so many new people, made so many friends, and had so many great experiences that I will certainly never forget it, and I feel that my life has been so very much enriched because of it.
In some ways it was also a personal test, to see if I could handle being away from home for so long — and I passed the test! Four months seemed like a long time to me, but then I met several others who were traveling for much longer periods of time: 6 months, 8 months, 1 year, even 2 years!
On any trip of this this length there are usually things that go wrong, such as losing important or valuable items, losing luggage, getting sick or injured, getting robbed or pick-pocketed, getting scammed, major delays in transportation, or having bad experiences with other people. But I was extremely lucky not to have any significant mishaps at all! I did have several close calls, but they all turned out OK in the end. I lost several items, but always recovered them. In Vietnam my camera fell out of my pocket in a jeep and I didn’t notice it until I got back to the hotel and the jeep had left. Fortunately I was able to get a hold of them and get it back. In the same place my phone stopped working when I was caught in a heavy rain and it got wet. But the phone magically came back to life after a couple days. My camera broke in Thailand, but I found someone who was able to repair it (something unheard of in the US)! Twice I left my card in the ATM machine, but was able to recover it later each time. Parts of my suitcase broke a couple of times to the point of becoming unusable, but I was able get it repaired each time. Except for getting sick once near the beginning of my trip, I was in very good health for the remainder of the trip. In fact with all the activity I did, I was quite a bit more fit and in better physical shape than normal.
Here are some statistics regarding my trip:
I started my journey with a quote from Science Fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin. I now end it with another quote, from architect Anthony Lawlor:
The pleasure of the soul appears to be found in the journey of discovery, the unfolding revelation of expanded insight and experience.
–Anthony Lawlor, “A Home for the Soul”
