Wild Memories Photography Tours

A day or two ago I got a wild hair and decided to go up to Beartooth Lake on my never ending quest to film an osprey catching a fish. We had lots of rain, and snow at higher elevations, over the Labor Day weekend so I had a bad case of cabin fever. Beartooth Lake is a little over 90 miles from our trailer, through the park and out the Northeast Entrance. I started early so there were times from Mammoth to Roosevelt I had the road all to myself. I noticed a lot of ducks at Blacktail Ponds and Floating Island Lake. They are flocking together and getting ready for the migration south. In the Lamar Valley there was a group of at least 15 sandhill cranes so they are forming flocks to head south as well. There is a bison carcass near the confluence of the Lamar River and Soda Butte Creek. I stopped and saw a couple of bald eagles and Deby who said a couple of grizzlies had been there and left. We had a nice visit and then I moved on. This is the first time I have gone up the Beartooth Highway this year. I am not sure why because we normally go up there several times a year. I had forgotten how beautiful it is, especially with the fresh dusting of snow on the mountain tops. Beartooth Lake is beautiful! It is right next to the road and therefore heavily visited but it was still beautiful.

I set up my camera along with a chair and snacks, as well as a coat and gloves. It was cold and windy! I immediately saw 2 osprey and a bald eagle but none of them ever came close enough to film. There were still a lot of clouds lingering from the days of rain and they were moving fast. A lower layer of clouds was moving one direction and an upper layer was moving an opposite direction. I decided to risk changing lens from my osprey lens to a wide angle and did a couple of time lapses. I sat there for about 6 hours watching for osprey. I must have been looking up too much because 2 women stopped and asked if I had seen a black bear. I said I hadn’t. Evidently while I was starring at the sky a black bear walked along the hillside on the other side of the lake and I completely missed it.

I was surprised to see a dipper fly past. I wasn’t surprised a dipper was there because they live in streams at high elevations, walking along the stream bottom picking up aquatic insects. But in over 35 years of dipper watching I have never seen one on a lake. A few minutes later the dipper was back walking along the edge of the lake and occasionally wandering into the lake looking for breakfast. It found a big, juicy looking worm and slurped it down before I could film it.

Later I saw an American pipit walking along the lake edge and hopping around on the rocks in the water looking for insects. The American pipit has always seemed strange to me because the 2 places I most commonly see it are the Beartooths and along the Rio Grande in Texas. Those are 2 very different places.

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