A Winter Visit to Yellowstone

We recently drove from Denver, Colorado to Yellowstone National Park for a winter visit. There are 2 main things you can do while visiting Yellowstone in the 'slower season'. You can drive the 1 park road that is always open to all passenger vehicles - the Mammoth to Cooke City (northern road) route. You can also take a snowcoach into the Old Faithful area. Anya and I did both on this January visit. Driving the northern road offers individual flexibility in searching for wildlife and photogenic winter scenes. We drove this road for 3 days, staying each night in Gardiner, Montana. Wildlife viewing was fairly slow but when we did find animals they were always beautiful in their winter coats and mostly they were easy to photograph as they ignored the very few of us tourists who were there looking at them. 

We also took the snowcoach into Old Faithful. Once there you can get around by cross-country skiing, hiking, snowshoeing or by taking (expensive) daytours on offer. We mostly hiked the surrounding geyser basins. We had 3 full-on cloudy days here and I constantly wished for a blue sky day to make our geyser images pop a bit more. Still I felt like it was a great experience and well worth doing. A few of my favorite images are below.

All scenic images shown here were taken with a Tamron 28-300mm lens on a Canon 6D camera. All wildlife images shown here were taken with a Tamron 150-600mm lens on a Canon 6 D camera.