Over the years, I've shot literally hundreds of photos of mule deer. These are two of my favorites. Not because of any great commercial value or skill in getting them, but because of the memories of time spent in a truly wild and spectacular locale.
The cooking area is in the trees, along with the food pole, a couple hundred feet or so beyond Big Agnes in the photo. The timbered area looks dark in the photo, but not nearly as dark as it looked to me in the gathering gloom of late evening.
I wish that I could find somebody to do an oil painting of the scene in the lower photo. Man, I love that place! As the mountain men used to say, it's wild country with the hair still on it. It's a real shame that a great nation like the United States doesn't do a better job of protecting the few truly wild places that still somehow hang on in the lower 48 states.
I wish that I had a way to share the feel of this wild swath of the Yellowstone backcountry, but how do you put cold wind, the bite of snow and sleet, the cry of the sandhill crane, and the goosebumps that I felt whenever I'd look up to see the two bears wandering the ridges above camp, into the dry confines of a web page?