Arjun and I were in Yellowstone the week before Memorial Day.
If you know the park, you know what that means. Memorial Day is when the roads fully open, and that weekend is when the entire country and its minivans descend on the place. It gets crowded overnight.
But the week before? Barely anyone. Same cool weather, not chilly, not hot. Ideal.
We were there to see and photograph wildlife.
Day one, we were just driving around, scanning the meadows, looking for anything that moved. And if you know Yellowstone, you also know about the bear jams. Whole stretches of road where everyone pulls over to watch and photograph grizzlies.
I don't blame them. They're seeing something they don't get to see every day, and they want to take it in.
That first morning was cool, with just enough cloud to soften the light. Perfect for wildlife photography. We saw a couple cars pull over, and there she was. Our first grizzly of the trip.
Snow.
She's an iconic bear out there. One of the few the photographers and rangers know by name, after years of showing up in the same valley season after season.
We parked on the shoulder and walked back toward where she was. And in the two minutes that took, it felt like half the park had shown up.
I didn't mind. I started doing what I always do. Thinking about composition, clean backgrounds, where the light was falling. I found a tree at a comfortable distance and set up there. I like being alive, so I keep my distance.
As the crowd grew, so did the number of geniuses in it.
I don't really blame them either. Most of them have no idea this is the apex predator of the entire ecosystem. To them it's a big fluffy brown dog. A tourist with a Samsung phone tried to creep in close for a photo, and a few more followed. Within three feet of a grizzly. That kind of stupid.
And it worked exactly how you'd expect.
Snow got anxious. She turned away from the road and started moving off the only way she could, which happened to be straight toward the tree I was standing at.
Not the position I wanted to be in.
There's a strange math that happens in that moment. How far is she. How fast can she close it. Where do I go. I'd already picked my exit before any of this started, which is the only reason I wasn't panicking now.
So I backed off. Quietly picked up and skedaddled back into the safety of the crowd. The whole time, at any given moment, I made sure I was never the person closest to the bear. That was the one rule I wasn't going to break.
A minute or two later, she settled. Turned back around and walked into the meadow near the cars, and posed there for a few seconds.
This was within five feet of where people were standing. Well inside the minimum focus distance of my long lens. Too close, technically.
But I fired off a few full-face portraits anyway. And then she shifted, and for a moment I had her against a clean forest backdrop. The shot I'd been picturing the whole time.
What an encounter.
