The photos below are pretty much in reverse chronological order because as any high school journalism student will tell you, you never want to bury the lead.
After a day of taking average photos at Yellowstone of the usual tourist attractions, my family headed north back to our rental house in Livingston, MT (50 miles north of the Gardiner Entrance). We immediately noticed a billowing smoke plume in the distance in the direction we were heading. It ended up being in Pine Creek, about 5 miles south of our rental. The first photo is a cropped image taken with a telephoto lens from the bank of the Yellowstone River behind the cabin.
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| Close up of Pine Creek wildfire |
The second photo taken from the same location with a wide angle lens shows the smoke from the Pine Creek fire rising up, into a cloudless sky, under the smoke of the Bozeman Fire 20 miles to the west.
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| Pine Creek fire seen from our vacation rental |
This photo, taken earlier in the day at Yellowstone, shows a Killdeer wading among the thermophiles in the scalding water of Mammoth Hot Springs to eat bugs that are obviously less heat tolerant than itself.
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| Killdeer picking dead bugs from Mammoth Hot Springs |
The Killdeer even waded into the deeper water to take a hot mineral bath.
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| Killdeer bathing in Mammoth Hot Springs |
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| Flowing hot spring and mineral deposits |
