Mike Clark

We were up on Dunraven Pass in Yellowstone the last day it was open this season. I'll always remember it as an eerily quiet day—the thick morning fog giving way to an afternoon snowsquall. I made this photograph in an unexpected moment when the fog lifted and the sun peeked in. The image makes me think of this passage from Hawks Rest:

Out in nature you've got 4.6 billion years of success—the best of everything, the finest the world has come up with, all around you, night and day. Go out for a stroll in the woods and you walk among champions.

Yellowstone is a festival of champions, which I guess is why I continue to be drawn to it. Take these lodgepole pines, the dominant tree in Yellowstone, for example. The parent trees were likely victims of the 1988 fire. At their feet lie the next generation, a flush of young trees. The genius of the lodgepole is that it produces closed ("serotinous") cones that are covered by a hard, waxy resin. These cones only release their seeds when opened by heat (around 113 degrees). During a wildfire, lodgepole seeds can be released in huge numbers. And even before the smoke clears, the seeds are distributed by winds and gravity to begin repopulating the burnt area. Some of the young lodgepoles in this photograph already bear the cones that ensure their survival.

That's success, even if it does take a relatively long time...