Unfortunately for my plans of making it to Glacier today, two articles I saw in the morning paper here changed my plans. First, the fireworks show for the Fourth of July is tonight and second, Barack Obama is going to be in Butte’s Fourth of July parade at 10am in the morning. So, plans changed, and I’ve got a tent pitched at Lowlands campground in Beaverhead – Deerlodge National Forest to crawl into after the fireworks show. My plans are to wake up at 7am and hit the road into town and clear the metal detectors to get a spot close along the route to shoot pictures from. I imagine the Secret Service will have a field day with my camera bag.

After we made that decision, we hit a couple sporting goods stores to find some hiking boots for Sarah, watched Hancock at the local cinema (loved the movie – Will Smith is definitely becoming one of my all-time favorite actors) and attempted to explore some museums around town. Sadly, it seems like most of the town had closed up shop a day early for the holiday weekend.

Rookwood Speakeasy Museum was closed, Myra Brothel Museum was closed and we couldn’t find the local art gallery. However, Charles Clark Chateau museum was open and we toured a turn of the 1900s private mansion turned museum. Cool place, octagonal rooms, library and ballroom included.

So… now, we’re sitting in a thunderstorm, two hours before the the fireworks show is scheduled to take place waiting for it to clear off and hear whether or not it will actually happen. And when I say thunderstorm… at its peak a few moments ago, I couldn’t see out the car windows.

Travel Distance: 75 miles around Butte, MT

Hit the road this morning from camp and made the trip to Old Faithful in Yellowstone (through road construction, where I met a nice older couple from West Virginia). From there, I decided to take a small detour through Bozeman, MT to get some ice cream (I should have stopped at the Cold Stone Creamery though) and continued on to Butte. Tonight, I’m spending the evening and likely into early morning holed up in a hotel room editing pictures. Nothing to exciting today really; check out flickr tomorrow for pictures.

Travel Distance: 251 miles

Sunrise was not nearly as impressive this morning as it was yesterday or the day before, unfortunately, there was a low hanging cloud that diffused most of the light. I took a few shots anyway, then headed down to the previous morning’s spot to show it to Sarah. Apparently, she’d already been there 4 years ago or so with her family.

Back to camp for a nap (is anyone noticing a trend?) and we headed into the park (for what will be my last time, this trip at least) and decided to defy the predictions of thunderstorms and go on the hike I’d been planning on doing, through Cascade Canyon.

Now, to get to Cascade Canyon, there are a couple of options. You can take a boat across the lake for $5 each way, or you can hike a few miles from the Jenny Lake Visitor Center to the mouth of the canyon. Well, you can bet on which one we did. Thirteen miles of hiking later, we came to the mutual conclusion that 13 miles at a go was too much. My knees were killing me (I only made it with the aid of my trekking poles) and she has a wonderful assortment of blisters on her feet.

And that’s how we came to pitch a tent at 6:30 in the evening, ready to call it a day in what is apparently a primo mosquito breeding ground. A hasty dinner eaten inside the Jeep and now we’re simply reading to pass the time until it is dark enough to go to sleep (and hopefully the kids in the RV parked across the campground will stop screaming by then).

No sunrise in the morning for me (at least I hope not to be awake to see it) and tomorrow when we break camp (hopefully amid fewer mosquitos, we’re passing through the southwest portion of Yellowstone on our way to Glacier. It’ll be a short traveling day as my intent is to get a hotel room mid-afternoon and get to work on editing all the photos from Yellowstone and Grand Teton (there’s a ton).

Travel Distance: 78 miles and another 13 miles on foot

I think the most humbling moment of my vacation occurred this morning. I suppose that’s what shooting the sunrise at the Tetons next to a guy who is going to expose an 8″ x 10″ sheet of Velvia will do. Frankly, I can’t imagine having the patience to shoot on a piece of film that costs $10. And that’s after you compose upside down and reversed. Eric (the photographer from Colorado that I met yesterday showed up for sunrise and brought his camera along, (and not his Holga this time). He took two shots the entire sunrise; I must have shot 50 and I’m certain another guy down our little line shot over 200 (for some reason he was using continuous (which doesn’t make sense unless he was bracketing).

I finished up the sunrise with a trip back north, towards my campsite, hoping to spot some animals to shoot along the way. Unfortunately, I only shot a couple of bison, and I have plenty of pictures of them. Got to my campsite and took a 2 hour nap (getting up for sunrise every morning is wearing on me.

After I “checked-out” of the campsite, I hit the road south, there were still a few places I wanted to go but hadn’t made it to yet. I made the drive up Signal Mountain and wasn’t terribly impressed with what I found; that’s probably because I don’t find the geography of the rest of the park nearly as exciting as the mountains themselves.

Back down the mountain I drove, heading towards Lupine Meadows which, to my disappoint, is really just a trailhead to a few lakes. But I hit the trails anyways and was rewarded with a very photogenic squirrel shelling a nut along with an elk herd. So all wasn’t lost on that trip.

Next stop was the airport to pick up Sarah, an friend of mine who is accompanying me on the next leg of my trip (I’ll be dropping her off on my way home). My timing was impeccable, I entered the terminal just as she was coming out of the ramp. We headed into Jackson in search of somewhere to buy a couple groceries and things, thankfully we were able to track down a K-mart in the phone book (no Walmart here apparently). Then off to a western wear store where I admired Stetson hats and belt buckles. (Watch out Scott, I’m going to attempt to find a comically large belt buckle so that I can outdo you next time we see each other. Hopefully it won’t be so large that I won’t be able to sit down.)

Since she was tired from her flight and I was tired simply from traveling, we pitched our tent on some Forest Service land outside of the park around 7:30pm. A little wandering, checking out the lake we were by and now it’s time to call it a night. There’s a sunrise in the morning to shoot.

Travel Distance: 110 miles

Woke up at an ungodly hour this morning… 4:45am I believe in order to get to Jenny Lake to shoot the sunrise. I barely made it, guess I should have planned a bit better and paid more attention to how long it took me to go in. After sunrise there, I hit my secondary location, an old barn along Mormon Row, the area that a group of Mormon settlers established homesteads on. Unfortunately for me, there was a group of about 15 photographers there doing some sort of organized group shoot and they went in close to the barn for portraits just as I was setting up to use the entire barn as a photo element.

Oh well, I switched gears and got to work, by the time my new concept was executed, they’d moved on down the road to the next building and I shot my first idea. Time will tell which will come out better. I did a bit of tooling around, looking for moose, but finding only bison. Dropped by the Visitor’s Center again and watched their movie, dumped photos onto my external hard drive and finished the book I was reading. Nothing terribly exciting this morning.

This afternoon, I met another photographer (from Colorado) named Eric at a turnout down a side road. He’d been shooting the carcass of what I believe was a mule deer with the Tetons as a backdrop with his medium format camera (think big, heavy and the image you see is upside down and reversed). He was a pretty cool guy, and we parted ways only to run into each other at the next stop up the road. We ended up going on a bit of a hike to pass some time as the 2pm sun was too harsh for any really good photos here. He pointed out a good place for a morning photo and we’ll probably run into each other at sunrise.

By this point it was early evening, so I headed north to get a campsite for the night (I’ve been getting sore from sleeping in the Jeep) and set up camp, cooked some dinner and repacked the Jeep a bit more efficiently. I tooled around until sunset and then headed south, timing my morning drive and now I’m sitting in a parking lot waiting for the stars to come out so I can do some star trails with the Tetons as a background and hopefully have it pretty well reflected in the small lake I’ll be on the shore of. [Scratch that, the shoot is canceled for tonight due to some cloud cover that rolled in.]

Oh, and another lovely tidbit, I got some text messaging spam earlier tonight. Guess I get to call Alltel and complain so they won’t bill for receiving it. Talk about the stupidest thing ever – being billed to receive messages. It’s not like I can say, “I only want to be able to receive them from these people; those are the ones I’m willing to pay for.”

Travel Distance: 75 miles