At first sight Browns Park does look brown this time of the year.

Approaching Browns Park National Wildlife Refuge in Northwest Colorado (Canon 7D with 10-24mm lens at 24mm, f/16, 1/350, ISO 800)

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But Browns Park is all about the Green. It’s about the Green River.

This isolated valley is 35 miles long by five to six miles wide. It begins in far eastern Utah about 25 miles downstream from Flaming Gorge Dam and follows the Green River downstream into Colorado, ending at the Gates of Lodore in Dinosaur National Monument. It seems to have been named for Baptiste Brown, a French-Canadian fur trapper who came there in 1827, and at first people called it Brown’s Hole. But explorer John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition down the Green and the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869, called it Brown’s Park, a more appropriate and attractive name for this basin. Still later, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which doesn’t like possessive apostrophes, changed the name to Browns Park.

The valley’s isolation made it a haven during the late 19th century for outlaws like Butch Cassidy. Even today it’s so isolated that not one person in Boulder who I have mentioned it to has ever heard of Browns Park. It’s so isolated that the nearest place to get a bed is 60 miles away. That’s the reason why two years ago, when I visited Browns Park for the first time, I only passed through the area in the middle of the day — not the best time for nature photography. On this visit I camped out in the refuge’s “Crook Campground.” No one else, crooks or otherwise, were in the the campground for the two nights I stayed there.

Home on the Range (Canon 7D with 50mm lens, f/16, 1/250, ISO 400)

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In the old days living in Browns Park was even more primitive. At the end of Beaver Creek Trail I came across this early homestead.

An Early Home in Browns Park (Canon 7D with 10-24mm lens at 10mm, f/8, 1/180, ISO 200)

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Pilot Butte is only about 10 miles west of Rock Springs, Wyoming, where I spent the night of August 21. At least it’s only that far if you take a steep, winding, rutted, dirt road, as I did. The usual route is about 30 miles.

At 7,932 feet, Pilot Butte is the highest point on White Mountain and is visible for 30 miles in all directions. The original residents of the area, the mountain men of the 1820s, and emigrants along the Oregon and Overland trails all used it as a landmark.

Today, it’s a part of the Bureau of Land Management’s White Mountain Wild Horse Herd Management Area. This huge area where the wild horses roam on the range includes 392,000 acres, mostly of sagebrush.

A Simple Sunrise over Sagebrush (Canon 7D with 50mm lens, f/16, 1/45, ISO 1600)

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Three Wild Horses Near Pilot Butte (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f/8, 1/750, ISO 400)

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Two of Them Check Me Out (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f/8, 1/1000, ISO 800)

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Two Other Wild Horses Let Me Walk Close to Them (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 180mm, f/8, 1/350, ISO 800)

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Like the Wild Horses, This Pronghorn near Pilot Butte is Just Looking (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 390mm, f/8, 1/1500, ISO 400)

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Early travelers through southwestern Wyoming named this area as a sign that they were getting close to the Green River. But they still had a way to go to reach water in this dry land.

The Shoshone Indians who arrived about 700 years ago in Southwestern Wyoming named the river the Sisk-a-dee-agie. When the fur trappers arrived in the early 1800s, the closest they could get to that pronunciation was Seedskadee. That’s still hard for me to say, and anyway we now usually call it the Green River.

The refuge is a narrow strip of land running on both sides of the Green River for about 25 miles. It is a few miles upstream from the Flaming Gorge Dam and a few miles downstream from the Fontenelle Reservoir.

The Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge perpetuates the river’s original name. The Shoshone word meant the “river of the prairie hen,” the big bird that we call the Greater Sage-Grouse. This wildlife refuge is all about the Green River and the sage brush that covers most of its 27,000 acres.

Only grouse and pronghorn are adapted to eating sage brush in any quantity. Consequently, I wasn’t surprised to see both this bird and this mammal as I drove through this refuge.

An Adult Female Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocerus urophaqsianus) in the Refuge Named for Her (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f/8, 1/1000, ISO 800)

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With my telephoto lens I didn’t get so close to this bird that I spooked it. Likewise, I was able to keep my distance from the pronghorn below. It doesn’t seem concerned by my presence.

A Pronghorn Pees at Seedskadee (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f/8, 1/500, ISO 800)

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During my brief stay as I passed through this refuge en route to the town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, where I spent the night, I captured one other photo worth sharing.

Three American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erthrorhynchos) Swim Together in the Green (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 380mm, f/8, 1/1500, ISO 800)

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As a photographer, these pelicans are one of my favorite species. One reason is that they coordinate their movements much more than other birds or animals as they hunt for food in a group. American White Pelicans can teach us a thing or two about cooperation.

After four nights in a cabin near Yellowstone National Park’s Roosevelt Lodge, my friend Mark and I had to return to civilization. Mark had to be at the Jackson Hole Airport by noon on August 21, and since we were three hours from the airport, we set out at about 5:30 a.m.

We knew that we would want to make several stops en route to the airport, and we did. In fact, we arrived with only minutes to spare.

The 125-mile route took us via Yellowstone’s Grand Loop Road past some of the park’s most glorious scenery along the Yellowstone River and Yellowstone Lake as well as Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park.

At sunrise we happened to be near a wide spot of the Yellowstone River in the Hayden Valley. Fog covered the river, but then the sun broke through.

A Foggy Morning on the Yellowstone River (Canon 7D with 10-24mm lens at 14mm, f/16, 1/30, ISO 200)

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Fog Completely Covers the Yellowstone River (Canon 7D with 10-24mm lens at 16mm, f/16, 1/180, ISO 200)

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Mark and I had two more full days to explore Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, and we made the most of it. Each morning we were out before sunrise and back to our cabin near Roosevelt Lodge after sunset.

Each of the three days had the same themes, but with variations. We saw wolves every day, although after the first day we could see them only through spotting scopes, too far away to photograph. We also saw many of the park’s 4,300 bison every day, although after our first day they weren’t too close for comfort. We saw different birds each day.

Each day we hiked to a different lake. One day we also hiked along a rushing mountain stream. On another day we hiked to where we could view a 132-foot waterfall.

We started our second day in the dark and drove all across the north end of Yellowstone to Cooke City, Montana, just outside Yellowstone’s northeast entrance. We ended that day by driving to Mammoth Hot Springs, where we ate at the more upscale restaurant there, which also had the only Internet access we could get in the park.

During each of the three days we were there we made sure to take it easy during the middle of the day when the light is harsher and the wildlife less active. We napped, read, and backed up our photos.

“This is really a relaxing vacation!,” Mark exclaimed more than once. It was for me too.

Near Cooke City as we returned to Yellowstone we spotted this chubby-looking hawk. Every time I look at this picture I imagine that I see a stuffed guy sitting back contentedly with his hands in his pockets.

This Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) Looks Satisfied (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f/8, 1/1500, ISO 800)

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Our first full day of this visit to Yellowstone National Park gave Mark and me thrills at both ends.

While Mark and I enjoy traveling on our own, guides can be valuable in providing an introduction to a new area. We therefore signed up for a “Wake up to Wildlife” tour scheduled to depart from Roosevelt Lodge at 7 a.m. on August 18 in a historic 1936 tour bus. That was a late start for two photographers who like to take advantage of the first light, but it was the best we could do. Actually, we didn’t even do that well.

The bus, driven by tour leader Helga Ihsle Pac, was about half an hour late because of a traffic jam. Even Yellowstone has traffic jams, but this one, like most of them in the park, was due to animals, not vehicles. She said that a large herd of bison had blocked the road. Mark and I had a similar experience a few days later.

I had assumed that getting such a late start was bad luck for us. But you never can tell.

A Chinese story tells of a farmer who had one old horse to till his fields. One day, the horse escaped into the hills, and when the farmer’s neighbors sympathized with the old man over his bad luck, the farmer replied, “Bad luck? Good luck? We’ll see.”

A week later, the horse returned with a herd of horses from the hills, and this time the neighbors congratulated the farmer on his good luck. His reply was, “Good luck? Bad luck? We’ll see.”

Then, when the farmer’s son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses, he fell off its back and broke his leg. Everyone thought this very bad luck. Not the farmer, whose only reaction was, “Bad luck? Good luck? We’ll see.”

Some weeks later, the army marched into the village and conscripted every able-bodied youth they found there. When they saw the farmer’s son with his broken leg, they let him off. Now was that good luck or bad luck?

For us, in fact, just a few minutes later when we arrived at the western end of the Lamar Valley what we saw were wolves. Never before had I ever seen wolves in the wild, but I knew that Yellowstone has more wolves than any other place in the lower 48. Still, only about 100 wolves live in the park, a smaller population than that of any other large animal there.

We were lucky (I think) to see them right at the start of the tour. We were unlucky (I think) that they were about a half mile away. Not even hoping to get a photo of the wolves, I nevertheless captured the distant images of two of the wolves in the shot below. The dark spot to the left of the wolf at the back is probably blood from their prey, and two or three ravens are in the center. The second wolf is in the left foreground.

Two Wolves in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f/8, 1/1000, ISO 800)

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This winter when I visited Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks for the third time in my life, I knew that I would continue to keep coming back. I just returned in mid-August especially because I wanted to experience Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley in the summer.

The Lamar Valley sits in the far northeast corner of this huge national park that is larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. While this is probably the most beautiful part of the park, it is also the least visited.

My destination was a “Roughrider Cabin” at Roosevelt Lodge in the north central section of of the park. These cabins are the accommodations closest to the Lamar Valley. My friend Carmen Todd had told me about them during our tour of Yellowstone this March.

These “rustic cabin units are sparsely furnished and heated with wood burning stoves and typically contain two beds and are all without bathrooms,” according to the Yellowstone website. “Communal showers and bathrooms are located nearby.”

Accordingly I assumed that the cabin I had rented would have two beds. Consequently, I invited my friend Mark, who used to live in Boulder but now lives and works in the Silicon Valley, to join me there. He gladly agreed to fly to the Jackson Hole Airport, where I could pick him up with my SUV.

But then when I called the lodge to confirm the reservation, they told me that the cabin I had rented had only one bed. When I called Mark to cancel my invitation, he instead agreed to sleep on the floor with my sleeping bag and air mattress.

So on August 16 I drove the 526 miles from my home in Boulder to the town of Jackson, Wyoming, in order to meet Mark’s plane early the next afternoon. En route I didn’t see anything worth reporting until late in the afternoon shortly before arriving in Jackson.

Three Female Dusky Grouse (Dendragapus obscurus) in the Last Light of Day (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f/8, 1/750, ISO 800)

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Close-up of One Female Dusky Grouse (Dendragapus obscurus) Beside the Road (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f/8, 1/750, ISO 800)

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Leaving Galapagos on August 5 was a cause for me to celebrate. Not because I wanted to leave, but because it was my birthday. I celebrated it that morning in San Cristobal Island of the Galapagos Archipelago and that evening in Quito, the capital of Ecuador.

We returned to the same Hilton Colon Quito hotel that had served us so well upon our arrival in Ecuador on July 27. But Quito was different this time. We had a sunny day so rare that as our plane landed we could see the snow-covered volcanos around the city. When we got to the hotel this time, it served me even better than before. This time the hotel’s 19-story building served as an observation post for me to photograph the scene. I found an unlocked door to the roof, where I had an unobstructed 360-degree view.

The Cayambe volcano is about 40 miles northeast of Quito, and at about 19,000 feet it is the third highest mountain in Ecuador. At 15,387 feet on its south slope it is the highest point in the world that the equator crosses and the only point on the equator with snow cover.

Ancient Volcano, Cayambe, and Modern City, Quito (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 100mm, f/16, 1/500, ISO 800)

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On August 4 I visited the last of the nine islands and islets that I went to in the Galapagos Archipelago when our yacht, the Xavier III, took us to Española, also known as Hood Island. Almost all of the Galapagos Islands have two or even more names.

Española is about 3.5 million years old and is the oldest of the Galapagos Islands. By no coincidence it is also the furthest south. Volcanos created each of these islands, which lie at the very northern edge of the Nazca Plate. This tectonic plate is moving while the hotspot that produces the volcano remains stationary.

Since this is the oldest of the the Galapagos Islands, I had expected to find the lava there well covered by soil. Hardly the case, the loop trail that took was the roughest of all of the islands. It was certainly worth the effort for all the wild beauty we saw.

But when we arrived at the trailhead after landing on the beach we had to wait. Sea Lions and Marine Iguanas had arrived there first and weren’t about to move just to get out of the way of humans.

Morris Garcia, the Park Ranger Who Guided Our Tour, Waits for Wildlife (Panasonic DMC-TS3 at 5mm, f/3.3, 1/1300, ISO 400)

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The Marine Iguanas seem to be rather sociable.

We Found this Pile of Marine Iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) on a Lava Rock Waiting Along the Trail (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 160mm, f/8, 1/350, ISO 1600)

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Our yacht, the Xavier III, took our tour group to the one island in the Galapagos that I had already read a lot about before going there on August 3. This island, called in Spanish as Floreana and in English as Charles, still offered me lots of surprises.

Floreana became world famous in the 1930s when three groups of Europeans decided to settle there. Most of these settlers were decidedly strange and at least five of them were soon dead under suspicious circumstances. Only Margret Wittmer remained, and it was primarily her book Floreana: A Woman’s Pilgrimage to the Galapagos that I had made sure to read before stepping on the island. You can read a succinct account of of this fascinating story “Unsolved Murder Mystery: The Galapagos Affair.”

While this story was a backdrop to our visit to Floreana, we were, of course, much more interested in the island’s wildlife than in its sordid history.

In the morning seeing more Galapagos Penguins absolutely delighted me. This time I got good shots of them in the water, where they are at home.

A Galapagos Penguin (Speniscus mendiculus) Grooms Itself Before Going for a Swim in the South Pacific Ocean (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f/8, 1/1000, ISO 800)

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A Galapagos Penguin (Speniscus mendiculus) Swims (Canon 7D with 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f/8, 1/2000, ISO 800)

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