Step outside the hotel in Gardiner, Montana in January and the cold hits you like a door swung open onto another world. The temperature might read ten degrees. It might hover at a frigid minus forty degrees. Either way, there is simply no other feeling like the one where cold air and anticipation collide.

Winter is the season that strips Yellowstone down to just the essentials. The two million-plus visitors who crowd the roads in the summers are long gone. The bison that spend the summertime dispersed across millions of acres have moved into the lower elevations and river valleys where the thermal ground keeps the grass a little more accessible and the air carries the breath of a still-active volcano beneath their hooves. Moose move into the willows, bighorn sheep leave their cliffs during the daytime, and fox and coyotes patrol the subnivean zone around the sage brush for prey.

Then there are the wolves. Wolf predation ecology in winter is one of the more remarkable things a wildlife photographer can witness. Deep snow gives the legendary wolves of Yellowstone a physics advantage over their prey, the ungulates. Elk and bison, with their weight distributed over hooves, punch through the crust. But the wolves, with their lighter bodies running on four broad paws spread wide, float across the surface with an almost magical ease.

But Yellowstone is not just about the wolves. It is bobcats prowling the boulder-strewn banks of the Madison River, invisible until they are not. It is red fox in full winter coat, moving through the snow, pausing, listening, then launching straight down through three feet of powder after a vole they heard but could not possibly have seen. It is bison standing in blizzard conditions with snow caked into their woolly foreheads, patient in a way that suggests they have been doing this longer than we’ve been watching — which, of course, they have. It is trumpeter swans on the geothermically warmed stretches of water, river otters working the edges of open water in the Lamar Valley, and bald eagles clustered in the cottonwoods.

I have spent the last five winters leading photographers through this ecosystem, and I can tell you with some confidence that every year is a new and different experience, magical in its own way. The diversity of large mammals in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is unmatched in the Northern Hemisphere outside of a handful of African parks, and in winter, when snow concentrates that diversity into the thermal corridors and valley bottoms, the photographic opportunities are simply astounding.

Two Landscapes, One Extraordinary Week

This workshop is structured around the fact that Yellowstone in winter is really two different photographic environments, each with its own character, its own wildlife community, and its own demands on the photographer.

The trip has two areas of focus: The northern range, based out of Gardiner, Montana, and West Yellowstone, with a focus on the interior of the park.

The northern range, made up of the Lamar Valley and the Yellowstone River corridor, is accessible by road in winter, which means we travel in a private Sprinter van, moving quickly and quietly when we need to, stopping the moment something happens. And things happen constantly here. The northern range is wolf country in the most fundamental sense. It is also where you’ll find the highest density of coyotes, along with red fox, raptors, bighorn sheep, elk, pronghorn, river otters, and anything else Mother Nature wants to send our way. 

After three full days on the northern range, we transfer to West Yellowstone and shift into a completely different mode. The interior of Yellowstone is accessible only by snowcoach or snowmobile during the winter, no private vehicles allowed. For three days, we travel by private snowcoach, which gives us the flexibility to stop where we want, for as long as we want.

The interior takes us deep into the thermal basins, through the lodgepole forests, past the geyser fields where bison stand in clouds of steam so thick you sometimes have to wait for the wind to shift before you can make the frame. This is a different Yellowstone. Quieter, more remote, more elemental, this part of the park produces different images.

Together, the two halves of this workshop give you a more complete picture of what winter actually is in this ecosystem than any single-location workshop can provide.