Yellowstone Expedition 2023
A Journey Into The Frozen Wild Lands
Death. Life. Blood. Beauty. That is what the Yellowstone landscape offers for its full-time residents. From mice to moose, all animals must go through it. The laws of nature are omnipresent throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
I had one of the craziest experiences in Yellowstone earlier this year. I spent a week in Lamar Buffalo Ranch with a team of researchers and wolf experts as a member of Yellowstone Forever’s Wolf Week program. In February. It was so cold your lips would begin to crack and break if you didn’t have the right kind of lip balm. Still, this was one of the best weeks of my life. I can’t share everything I experienced that week in a single post, but I will explain these images.
The line between life and death is quite thin for the animals that call the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem home. This bull elk had been trapped in a gully by a pack of around 20 gray wolves that desperately needed nutritious calories to fuel the life force of their growing pack through the brutality of Yellowstone’s winter. If they didn’t successfully complete this hunt, it could’ve cost some of them their lives that winter. Especially the pups.
The first image is of me holding the remains of a bull elk that had been taken by wolves three weeks prior to me holding it. Members of Yellowstone Wolf Project had sawed off a section of bone to research in their labs a few days prior, hence the perfect cut at the end of the tibia bone.
The second image is of wolf scat. Poop. You can see the hairs of the elk that were not entirely digested. The third image is of me using one of the many spotting scopes we had with us. The fourth (video) is when we had our best view of the entire trip of a pack of wolves. The fifth is a wolf collar that biologists use to monitor the location of wolves wearing it. We all agreed that this could be made smaller for the sake of the wolves. I hope technology allows this to happen soon. I think the problem is that Yellowstone’s weather can get so cold that it will freeze the internals if it were any smaller. I’m not sure, though. The sixth image is the body of the elk three weeks after the attack. The 7th image is of the same body, but only a few days after the attack. The eighth image is of Dough McLaughlin’s (owner of Optics Yellowstone) dog, Jackson. The 9th image is of me comparing my hand to gray wolf tracks made less than 24 hours prior. The 10th image is of me, very high on life. The last image is of my view of Montana from my plane as I landed.
My trip to Montana this year changed my life. On the expedition, I met a large number of new people in a relatively short amount of time. I became friends with them. Before long, it felt as though we were family. We still communicate through email, sharing photos, and such. After saying goodbye to them, I stayed at Treasure State Hostel in Bozeman for the next few days. During those days, I met another nine people just by exploring. My heart was full by the end of it all. I felt like a true Montanan. To be completely honest, Montana is a state I would not mind moving to. Either Montana or Oregon. But as of now, Michigan is great.
I’ll try to keep posting regularly on this blog. However, my second semester at Miami University as a graduate biology student has been quite time-consuming. I am in the process of creating a short documentary on the effects of regenerative agriculture on the natural environment. This film will be my final project submission for my second semester. I may publish it on YouTube unless I end up sending it to film festivals. I’ll just have to wait and see how things play out. That is all for now. Thank you for reading the entire article if you got this far!
If you want to hear more about this expedition I was on, let me know!
To read more, check out saadatfaiz.substack.com
