The Adventure is Born

*Snow covered pines in Yellowstone National Park. September 2017.*

What do the snowy mountains of Yellowstone and the sunny plains of the Maasai Mara have in common?

Very little, unless you consider the abundance of wildlife that each has to offer. For us, Yellowstone and the Mara are intimately intertwined.

It's mid-September 2017. Greg and I are on our first joint photo trip in Yellowstone. It's Friday and the weather has shifted from gorgeous and sunny to a dismal gray. All day it's gone from a sleety rain to a rainy sleet, back and forth, for hours. We spent the morning at Hayden Valley looking for wolves, but the only thing we'd seen is a lone grizzly so far off in the distance our telephoto lenses show it as a grainy brown dot on a yellow and green landscape. We did camp chores that morning: a hearty breakfast of fresh eggs and Taylor ham, a quick load of laundry, some phone calls back home. Around lunch time we headed over to Norris Basin and as predicted, it continued to rain, but at least it kept the crowds away.

Yellowstone packs some impressive numbers for visitors: More than four million people visit the park annually. But the high elevation and deep snows mean the park doesn't really get into full swing until May or June. 75% of the visitors see the park from May to August; another 16% visit in September, so after Labor Day, the park gets quiet. However, weather can be unpredictable: you may get a nice sunny day with temperatures of 75F and the next it can be snowing heavily. With winter fast approaching, the animals are out and about. Elk are in rut and grizzlies are fattening up for a long hibernation, so this is a great time for photographers to visit the park. There are great fall colors, lots of wildlife, and fewer people to fight against for space.

My brother and my parents had spent the early part of the week enjoying gorgeous fall weather. When I arrived mid-week, we were watching the weather forecast become more and more grim. A winter weather advisory was posted for Friday night with up to six inches of snow . Camping at the Canyon Campground was looking less like a good autumn trip and more like a wintry slog.

In the early afternoon we returned to camp from Norris wet, cold, and hungry. We spent the rest of the day standing around the campfire drying our shoes, sharing some stories, desires, beer, and splitting the cost of buying more and more firewood. Honestly, I think we bought about half a dozens cords of wood from the visitor center before they closed.

This is where the idea for Africa was born. We were lamenting the lack of wildlife we had seen: a few bison, some elk, that lone grizzly. But we wanted more. We wanted wolves. We wanted close-ups of grizzlies. That's what we were there for. We had both purchased Sigma 150-600 lenses prior to the trip and we were hungry to put them to work.

It was probably at that point (remember, some alcohol was involved) one of us said:

"Dude, we need to go on safari if we wanna put those lenses to use."

"Yasssssssss!"

The next day was amazing (more on that in another post) and on the drive back to Salt Lake City, our semi-sober idea sank in and we agreed that a safari had to be in our future. But it wasn't the sort of thing we were prepared to undertake in the next year or two. We wanted to do it right. We wanted the best possible experience, and we had to acquire some additional gear to make that happen.

We spent the remainder of 2017 researching where and when we should go. It was a toss-up between Tanzania, South Africa, and Kenya. Two episodes of Tales by Light following photographers in the Maasai Mara of Kenya settled it: Africa 2025. This became our anthem, our motto, the next big trip. The first major international undertaking that either of us had attempted. Research continued through 2018. The whole time we were learning about what time of year to go, what to look for, what gear to bring, and what settings to use to photograph the best that Kenya had to offer.

Fast forward to April of 2019. I get called up to head to the Democratic Republic of the Congo for work. My flights there would take me through Entebbe, Uganda on the shores of Lake Victoria in eastern Africa. Across Lake Victoria was the Mara. Entebbe is an hour's flight from Nairobi.

I called Greg.

"Dude. I'm going to Africa. You tryna go on safari with me in Kenya THIS YEAR?"

"Bruh, I have work."

"Dude, SA-FA-RI. AFRICA 2019"

"........."

"Dude, you know you wanna..."

"Dammit. Ok. I'm in."

We arranged a safari, flights, visas, vaccinations, acquired gear, and rented a Nikkor 600 mm f/4 lens in a whirlwind six weeks. There were almost daily calls reviewing the status of our checklist. But everything fell into place and in early June we were off on our Kenyan adventure!

*A storm develops over the shores of Lake Nakuru, June 2019.*

So there we were four days later on a warm, sunny afternoon on the banks of the Talek River in the Mara watching a pride of lions kill and eat a juvenile wildebeest (that's a story all on its own). We were more than 10,000 miles from Yellowstone, but connected through an idea that was born out of a snowy afternoon, a crackling fire, and a shared love of adventure and photography.

This is the OdysseyFive Photography blog. We'll post from time to time stories about our adventures, insights on shooting landscapes and wildlife, and how we can make a change in an ever-changing world.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

-ET&GT

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