• Part 1
• Part 2

I’ve only done minimal filtering, so there are a lot to go through. I have lots of stories to tell, so in the upcoming weeks, I hope to sort through the pictures, highlight the special ones, and narrate our trip.

In the interim, here are some ones I quickly pulled out. I have many more wildlife pictures to show – this series mostly focuses on some non-native mammals.

Here are pictures from the trip to Vermont to visit the Inn at Mountain View Farm. Enjoy.

Entrance Sign:

In Front of Main Inn:

The Barn (where ceremony will be):

View from one of the trails:

Main Inn:

Barn:

Garden (behind animal barn):

Sheep, Chilling:

View from ceremony site:

View back to farm from ceremony site:

Entrance to Kingdom Trails:

Entrance Sign:

Main Inn:

Barn:

Over the course of a few hours, we saw four moose (MOOSE!), a sage grouse, some mule deer, some bighorn sheep, a few coyotes, a bald eagle, and lots of elk – there is a huge feeding ground for them near Jackson. Somewhat disappointingly, no wolves. I might have spotted one later in the day, but it was probably a coyote – see below, you be the judge.

Things we learned:

• coyotes and wolves don’t like each other very much, and wolves generally win that battle
• for many years, conservationists thought that all predation was bad, which led to wolves being killed off – that position has changed, resulting in wolves being reintroduced in the wild, which has resulted in more manageable populations of competing species
• coyotes only weigh about thirty pounds – a lot of their size is fur
• wolves weigh about one hundred twenty pounds – big dogs
• they feed the elk, which is pretty controversial – but weaning the elk off the feed is difficult
• coyotes and wolves like elk
• coyotes and wolves almost never attack people
• the Tetons are a fairly new mountain range, as they have jagged peaks – older mountain ranges erode over time
• moose shed their antlers every year – you can tell the male moose by the stubs where their antlers used to be
• moose grow their antlers to duke it out with other male moose in attempt to woo female moose – if they can, they’ll kill each other doing so
• male bighorn sheep have more pronounced horns
• mule deer are very common in the west, whereas white-tailed deer are not

Below are some pictures. Some notes to self with respect to photography:

• clean the damn spot off your lens (it’s really problematic when zoomed in)
• get a bigger zoom lens (or at least a teleconverter…200 mm just doesn’t cut it sometimes)
• learn how to take better pictures

With those caveats, here are the photos – a few of them turned out well.

Bighorn Sheep

Elk

Coyote

Mule Deer

Moose

Geese

Pond

These are from later in the day when we made a separate drive through Teton National Park.

Tetons

Bird

Wolf? Or Coyote? Unless someone can prove otherwise (and if you can from this photo, I’d love to know how) I’m going with wolf.

Off to dinner at the Blue Lion, and then one more day of skiing tomorrow!

I decided to try snapping some photos of it – unfortunately, I haven’t quite gotten around to procuring a tripod, which is generally a necessity for nighttime photography.

Looking around the house, I was able to jerry-rig a relatively stationary and elevated platform out of a kitchen stool balanced on the roof of the garage and a stack of Meagan’s Domino magazines.

The results, while falling a bit short of fantastic, are pretty good for my impromptu effort. This one is my favorite – an airplane cruising right below the moon: