After spending many days far off the beaten path on forest service roads, my arrival to Gardiner Montana was a much-anticipated event. It was going to have all the amenities! A paved road, a restaurant, even a bathroom that wasn’t a tree. I was excited for the comforts but wasn’t exactly wielding high hopes for great wildlife pictures in the town. This, however, was about to change quite dramatically.
Gardiner is the entrance to the Lamar Valley, and it’s a cute little town, which was mostly shut down due to the time of the year. As such, my only stop was to get some fuel and dinner. After a delicious burger from a diner, I went on a 10-minute drive to a little forest service road which, according to the interwebs, had a camping area. Figuring there was no wildlife around, I pulled my car down the dirt road, parked, and carelessly hopped out to hike around. I was soon to find out this was a scary mistake.
A freezing wind ripped across the field on the back side of a mountain as I hopped across a small stream. After the stream, I walked into the breeze up a steep hill where I could not have expected what lay on the other side. Upon getting to the top, I found myself staring at 4 large and rather intimidating bison. They were about 10 yards away and seemed pretty startled by my abrupt presence. Immediately, I froze and tried to look non-threatening. Thankfully, these gigantic critters were more interested in eating the first available shoots under the snow than taking issue with my unwelcome encroachment. They did however keep a close and rather skeptical eye on me as I slowly and carefully walked to the relative safety of a large boulder. A boulder which I perceived I could leap upon if needed. As I crouched on the lee side of the rock, to escape the bone-chilling wind which by now was bringing ice pellets with it, one bison squared up to me, and stared.
The broad shoulders, dark face, the mountains in the background with ice pellets fiercely blowing across the whole scene were amazing. This animal just looked at me while I clicked away, the shutter rapidly sounding off 7 frames a second. I desperately tried to capture the near horizontal frozen precipitation as it rained down. The bison were totally unfazed by the meteorological events unfolding. Meanwhile, I was beginning to lose feeling in my fingers. It was really humbling to be close to such large land mammals, especially on a hike I wasn’t expecting to see a thing.
After about 10 minutes, the whole group decided it was time to leave, and walked away. I didn’t dare follow because I didn’t want to push my luck. These are wild animals, not something to be agitated. What shocked me about the whole experience was how easy it can be to have incredible experiences with wildlife when you are in places where people aren’t. In this case, I wasn’t remote, I was just in Gardiner when there are practically no visitors in certain months. Early spring is still quite cold, and the summer season was still a month away. These critters were there because there weren’t people there to drive them off yet.
The bison moved on, and I made the hike down the steep hill, across the small icy stream, and back to Ethel, my wonderful home. Once again, I was amazed by the beauty of our country, and felt fortunate to have these animals to look at and a free land to camp on. As I began my nightly ritual of shivering myself to sleep until my sleeping bag warmed up, I scrolled through the photos on my camera and smiled at the images. The beautiful animals had me super excited for the next day when my journey would take me into the Lamar Valley in search of the first baby bison of the spring! Read the next post to see the pictures of this cute little red dog, and also hear about how the bison got his revenge for scaring him.
