These ranch fences went on and on… I probably could have stopped anywhere to take this shot — it looked equally long no matter where you stood!

By the way, it is impossible to get an extended tripod through those slats, so don’t even think about it.

I checked the sweet internet earlier in the day to see exactly what time sunset was in Yellowstone. I have the sunrise/sunset website bookmarked, which is kinda strange, maybe… Anyway, It said 7:03 or something like that. I knew full well that it means the exact moment when the sun dips below the horizon, so the sun really “sets” about 30 minutes before that… but that didn’t help me get into the right position to see the sun right before it dipped below the mountains.

Luckily, there was a fine band of yellow sky lit up above the mountains, reflecting across the Madison River.

It was just me and about three hours of sunset at Yellowstone.  I feel very fortunate to be friends with the head ranger at the park, and just beforehand, at his home, he listed off about four awesome places to go see it.  He was right!  Also, he let me borrow his tripod, so that was a real life saver (as any good ranger is known for!).

I figured just about the worst place to stand in a lightning storm was a gigantic old tree. So, of course, I doubled those odds by erecting a metallic tripod at the base to capture the moment… sorry mom…

While I was at this conference deep in the mountains of Montana on the Wyoming border, we took a break one day to hike up into the mountains for several hours. We hiked up with a varied assortment of people, including a world class opera singer named Laura Loge. After we reached the summit (where there was still snow) and shared a lunch, we began the journey back home. Halfway down the trek, we stopped in this beautiful little valley and we implored her to sing some opportune opera while in the green amphitheater.

She sang perfectly and it was an utterly surreal experience. I flipped on the wide angle to get both Laura and her enraptured audience to the right, a bit further down the trail.

Laura told me afterwards that it was actually called an "art song", as opposed to the opera she had been singing nightly by the fireside in the cabin to all of us.

If you want to find out more about Laura, visit her homepage at www.lauraloge.com/ !

I was alone in Yellowstone, and I found this other guy standing alone too… so we spent a short moment together.

I had an incredible time at the ranch for the week. We took the horses for a few hours until we got to the junction in Yellowstone, where I then took Gerry’s car out for an adventure around the park. I drove all over the place until I was able to find this area to hole up, listen to music, and wait for the sunset.

I’ve spent my 4th in the wilds of Montana, out exploring the periphery of the ranch. I had a long photohike in mind, but I ended up getting distracted and never made it too far during the long walk. I also took a break to do some sketching… which is not good because it is really cutting into my photography time!

Hope you all have a good fourth!

I walked with this neuroscientist from Houston and a bunch of other smarty pants on a 5 hour hike around Yellowstone and over a mountain range. We didn’t bring enough water, so we would stop at snow runoff areas like this.

On the way to the ranch, we stopped at Artist’s Point for a little artistic fun… I didn’t have long to spend there, so I grabbed some quick shots and moved on!

This was shot at the entrance to a ranch on the edge of Montana.

This was shot on a warm afternoon on a lovely ranch in Montana, just inside the border of Yellowstone.

I was in a remote ranch in Montana for a week last year. Almost every day we would head out to ride horses, find a distant fishing hole, or just randomly explore. Everything was great until I decided to test the bear spray into the wind.

A shot from history here in the fertile crescent.

This was shot at my friend’s ranch near Yellowstone in the middle of the afternoon after a long day of fly fishing…

After a long hike through the mountains of Yellowstone, I came across over 40 horses sprinting from one meadow to the next. I stepped behind a tree to get out of the way and shot this one.

We were lucky enough to spend a week with Dr. David Sands, a microbiologist and geneticist (if those categories are even appropriate for someone so diverse).  Almost every day we went out on nature hikes and never made it more than a few hundred yards from the main lodge.  He would stop at just about any plant, pull it up, and rattle off a million interesting facts about it.  He constantly had Ethan running to and fro to collect different samples and then enter a Socratic mode, helping him to figure out what everything he found meant.

Dr. Sands also brought several suitcases full of petri dishes and a variety of interesting bacteria that have been the subject of some tests in his lab back in Bozeman.  Ethan and Dr. Sands did a number of experiments when they weren’t out in the field exploring and discovering.

The first time someone photographs a new phenomenon they get to name it, right? I call this a “Steamtrey”. [edit: on Flickr, someone recommended “Treynado”.] Well this shot took forever to get just right… The weather was perfect for the steam to come off the geothermal area and the wind patterns were even more perfect to whip up the steam into a 30-foot high tornado.

All that red in the foreground is a special bacteria that has formed in the super-heated water.

This is Yellowstone at sunset. It got rather chilly about this time but the warm steam from the geothermals kept us warm.

We drove down to the south of Yellowstone near Jackson Hole to explore the Grand Tetons. Just as I was taking this picture, a huge bison came up behind me and caught me unawares… and I barely got the fifth exposure to this HDR! It’s amazing how big those things are and they are still quiet.

I didn’t change the colors here!!!! Let’s get that right out of the way.

I came to visit a friend in Yellowstone National Park over the weekend and for a few days next week. He has a beautiful ranch on the edge of the park in Montana and is inviting up a fairly eclectic group of intellectuals, mostly associated around various Libertarian think-tanks with which I am involved. I know it all sounds a bit heady, but it’s one of my fun academic cerebral diversions.

There are daily and nightly TED-like talks from plant biologists, entrepreneurs, geneticists, paleontologists, artists, and yours truly (who is giving a possibly-in-comparison presentation on humans evolving into a super-organism via online games and social networks).

The picture here was taken on the summer solstice in thin-crusted geothermal hotbed of the Norris Geysirs. This particular place was not too far from something called the “whirlygig” (or somesuch).

The various colors are made from two merging rivers, each one with a dramatically different temperature. Different color bacteria live in each temperature of water - the red bacteria was over 160 degrees and the green was below 160. If anyone else was there during this same time, they can confirm the quirky nature of these dual rivers running in the same channel!