This was taken in the Lamar Valley, where a new wolf pack is trying to establish itself. They call the pack the Silver Pack.

2. Another shot from the same spot. Yes, I had a hard time concentrating on the wolves in the spotting scopes. After all, the wolves were laying around and there was all this magnificence around me.

3. The final shot from this same area.

4. This was taken on our way back from lunch, when we stopped to see what the Druid Peak Pack was up to. They were hanging out on the hillside; the two who had been playing earlier had stopped for a nap. The pack’s alpha female was wandering around, checking on everyone. A bit earlier, an interloper had shown up and a scuffle had ensued; the interloper was laying in a hollow, wounded. We don’t know how seriously.

5. This is shot from the top of the terraces at Mammoth Hot Springs. Yep, that’s a hot spring in the foreground.

6. Another one from Mammoth.

7. In the foreground is the (snow-covered) famed Minerva Terrace. In the background… mountains.

8. Yup, Mammoth.

9. And more Mammoth. See the boardwalk? Parts of it ended mysteriously where the springs have overtaken the boardwalk. But that’s another TT.

10. …and more.

11. I spent an hour in the lobby of the Mammoth Hot Springs resort with my MP3 player, watching the sun rise over the mountains. Every now and then, I’d run outside with my camera to get a shot. This is my favorite. We won’t speculate if I got it that time I was in such a rush that I jammed my arm into my coat and got outside to find… my coat was upside down. Well, at least only one arm was in it.

12. Crap. I picked this one earlier today and now I don’t remember where it’s from. I took it along the ride from Mammoth down to Canyon, over to the Lake, and off to Old Faithful. That’s the long way around, but it was worth it.

13. Same problem. And you wonder why I am ready to have copies printed and to spend the time putting the pictures into my scrapbooks?

3. I survived snowshoeing. This elk didn’t. Or maybe he was there as a trophy for my first snowshoeing experience.

4. This guy — we think — along with a friend welcomed me to my first snowshoeing trip. He and his friend stood forty yards apart… on opposite sides of the trail we were taking, and didn’t leave us a way around him. So the eight or so of us had to thread the bull elks. Who had big antlers that could have hurt us. Badly.

5. I put on four layers of pants and stood outside with a small group — ten or twelve of the twenty-seven of us — and watched this beautiful lady erupt for the last time in 2007.

6. This is her last daylight eruption of 2007.

7. This is her in 2008. She’s aging well, isn’t she?

8. She wasn’t the only thermal feature with things to say.

9. Daisy went off.

10. Riverside went off.

11. Castle went off.

12. Seeing all three of these — and the cross-country ski group got to Lonestar just as it erupted too — was pretty darn special. One of our three guides (who live nearby and do research in the park) said he’s been waiting years to see Castle erupt. I decided it was the Park’s way of thanking us, since we were there as part of a National Parks Conservation Association trip.

13. Yep. Saw wolves. From a distance. A great distance. I bet they knew we were there, only able to see them through our spotting scopes.