Life and Death in Yellowstone

Life. Death. The only two guarantees we all share.

Death is an important part of life in Yellowstone. Without it, some species, like the wolves pictured above, cannot survive.

This January, I had the privilege of watching life and death dance with one another deep in Yellowstone’s interior, when a pack of wolves hunted and consumed a bison over the course of several days. This happened in view of the road, at very close range in fact, which is extremely rare given the nature of Yellowstone wolves. Usually, a successful hunt and feeding thereafter happens at maybe… 2 miles, a mile, half a mile if you’re lucky, away, and is viewable only through a scope.

This one happened less than 100 yards away.

To even see a wolf up close is incredibly rare. I’ve maybe had 5-6 close up encounters in the 4 years I’ve been working in Yellowstone, and all of those were very brief, no more than a few minutes long.

This lasted all day long, for multiple days.

A pair of black wolves test an injured bull bison.

What an experience.

In the winter, only the northern 20% of Yellowstone, known as the Northern Range, is accessible to private vehicles. To get to the other 80% of the park, you have to take a snowcoach or snowmobile tour. This area of the park is known as the interior, and this past winter, I was a snowcoach driver in the interior, taking people in and out on tours every day.

A snowcoach deep in Yellowstone’s interior.

It just so happened that the day this wolf encounter took place, I was taking a group of wildlife photographers into the park, and when we stumbled upon this, we, for obvious reasons, stayed and photographed it all day long. I had these photographers with me for a couple of days, and so we got to photograph it again later, when the wolves were feeding on the bison after a successful hunt.

An iPhone photo my lens pointed at the scene… this also gives you an idea of how close they were!

A pair of wolves feed on the bison’s remains.

Somebody doesn’t want to share…

These photos may be hard to look at, but they are important photos in my opinion, because they tell the true story of life and death in Yellowstone. Life isn’t easy for these animals, and death can be quite gruesome. It is truly an eat or be eaten world. Bison, elk, and moose die, and in the process give life to wolves, grizzly bears, ravens, eagles, and a whole slew of other predators.

When these predators eventually die, their bodies decompose, giving life to the grasses that will then feed the bison, elk, and other herbivores.

It is an endless, interconnected loop of life and death in this ecosystem, and as difficult as it might be to watch at times, I also find it incredibly beautiful that this place is able to naturally maintain such a flawless balance.

This cycle is Yellowstone in its truest and most rudimentary form, and it’s something that I was so very lucky to get to observe this winter. If you want to see all of the footage and photos I captured during this incredible encounter, and see all of the other wildlife I photographed as a snowcoach driver, you can check out the YouTube video I made about my time as a snowcoach driver, which is linked HERE.

And if you’d like to try to capture photos like the ones you see here yourself, I’d love to have you along for one of my Winter Wildlife of Yellowstone workshops.

Thanks for reading everyone, I hope you enjoyed the photos and the new YouTube video, and maybe I’ll get to shoot alongside some of you on a workshop in a future winter!

In the meantime, get out there and shoot some photos, and I look forward to sharing more stories with you again soon.