Yellowstone Like You’ve Never Seen It | National Geographic

What is a national park? What are they for? Are they a playground for us? Are they for protecting bears and wolves and bison? But they got to be for both, and you have to do both without impacting the other very much.

As you drive into Yellowstone National Park, there's this famous Roosevelt Arch, and on the arch, it says, "For the benefit and enjoyment of the people." One of the biggest challenges of this project was working in National Park and the nature of Yellowstone being basically the most famous National Park in the world. This felt that it had much more weight to try and photograph something of that kind of glory, and also a place that's been photographed probably more than any other place on Earth.

My main focus was the people. I call it the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Saga. It really is all these people, as spread out as they are, are all really interconnected. The first time in my life where so many people from different areas were really charged about one place, and it says something about how powerful this landscape is and what it does for people. People live there because they love living in a wild place.

Coexistence is happening right now. Wild animals, yes, they live in National Parks, but they also live where we live. All my work is about people connected to nature, but this reinforced it. You know, as wildlife photography, you get these moments in life, and they come along every few years. I must have taken, I don't know, 200,000, half a million photos of ravens, and one day that picture popped up. I'm done. I don't have to carry on doing this.

I did carry on, but my favorite photograph from this project is definitely three wolves feeding on a bison carcass along the Yellowstone River. You have those times where you show back up to the camera, and you think, "Well, I wonder if any animals passed through here?" It looks like nothing, but then you check the back of the camera, and it's like, "There's the picture."

I think it was the first day I was in the park. I saw a bison on the side of the road, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw this little red flash. It is one of my favorite pictures from the project too, and I took it on day one—just a total happy accident. You know, my job really was to celebrate the brilliance of these Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.

And I think when we celebrate things, we inherently have more of an appreciation for them, trying to protect them. What does it mean for 100 years to live in and around a part of the world that we put so much importance on that we're willing to protect it for so long? Look at what nature can do. Look at what nature can do to people. It's that powerful; it can lead our lives.

We're helping to translate to the world this vision of Yellowstone. The funny part of it is, you have to become obsessed to be able to do it. You can't do it any other way. Yellowstone lives and breathes wolves. In the last 20 years, I wanted to photograph them and bring that to light.