Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park
Time Taken: October 2012
Yeah. That’s an elk.
That’s not a feed-pit it’s eating grass out of, by the way. That’s the edge of the gravel-filled box they set up to make flat areas for tents at particularly hilly campgrounds.
Specifically the one that I’d spent the night camping on.
I hadn’t picked my campsite for its deliciousness, but apparently it was quite high.
This was early in the morning, about twenty minutes after I’d finished packing up my tent at the longest. I’d just come back from the bathrooms to see an elk walking around the campground.
There are warning signs all over the National Park about avoiding the wild animals. Especially the larger ones, like, say, elk. So I stood there and waited until it wandered a bit further away from the path. And right towards my campsite, but hey, can’t have everything.
I was able to take a circuitous route cutting through an unoccupied campsite to get to my camera and get some photos, at least.
And then the next elk showed up, and another, and another. I got some fifty or so photos of elk wandering through the campground. I was probably a bit closer than the warning signs would have preferred to the elk at a few points (though nowhere near close enough for them to notice me), but that’s more because the elk started flanking me than because I did anything like move…
