We stop to say our goodbyes about one mile or so from the trailhead. Annie and Tom will be heading on to Mammoth for the evening and then on out to West Yellowstone. I'll be heading back to Rescue Creek. Having two good friends join me for a few days was the highlight of a very memorable trip to Yellowstone.

In the top photo, Annie and I stand against the wild backdrop of Blacktail Creek and the northern range of Yellowstone. It's all good country, made all the better by the great company that I've enjoyed over the past few days. I have to admit that for the first time in all of the years that I've hiked and backpacked in Yellowstone, much of it alone, that I was feeling a bit lonely when I turned and started hiking back to camp that evening. I'll be looking forward to our next meeting in Yellowstone.

In the background of the photo above, you can spot some of the fencing used in studies of the northern range, where some areas have been enclosed to study the effects of grazing wildlife.

Below: Now here's a strange one. As I walked back to camp, I spotted, way off in the distance, some sort of large brown animal that seemed to be sitting motionless in the meadow directly in front of my camp. As you can see from the photo below, it's a large bull elk. However, when I first spotted it, it was so far away that I simply couldn't identify it without binoculars. As I moved closer, it looked more and more like a bear. Then a bear with a cub. Uh oh! When I finally got close enough to use my 300mm lens to get a closer look, I realized that it was a bull elk using a muddy wallow by Rescue Creek. What I thought was a bear from a distance was actually its butt sticking up in the air while it thrashed the mud with its rack. When it raised its head, with weeds and mud dangling from the rack, it looked just like a cub popping up. The photo was cropped quite a bit to make the bull easier to see. Needless to say, I was relieved to learn that it wasn't a bear with a cub right in front of my camp.