Day 42 – Mt Rushmore And Wind Cave National Park, SD
Have you ever been chased by a bison? I have, and in fact, by two. Fortunately, I came back in one piece so I can share this story.
We visited Mt Rushmore and Wind Cave National Park yesterday. I always wanted to do the portraits for the presidents and today I finally did :-) It was a brief visit, as the sun wasn’t quite in the right position for photography.
Another hour later, we arrived at Wind Cave National Park. I typically did my photography homework before visiting a new park – what time to go, where to photograph, which photos inspire me, how I can do differently. Surprisingly, I found few photos about Wind Cave. The answer became clear when we signed up a cave tour. The cave path is very narrow – most of the time could allow only one person to pass. My tripod, off-camera-flash, and my Tenba camera backpack were all banned by my guide before the tour. I ended up dumping everything back to the car except the Canon 5D MarkIII.
Since my camera does not have flash, nor did I want to use it, I have captured most of the cave scenes with wide aperture (f2.8) and high ISO (12800) in order to avoid blurry image.
When we came back from the tour, it was already close to sunset. We drove up to Exposing the Past Pullout and stopped somewhere in a prairie-forest scene near the Rankin Ridge Pullout.
As I set up my tripod, I saw a sleeping bison somewhere in the distance (see above image). There was another on the other side of the ridge to my right – I couldn’t see it but could definitely hear the loud snore. Nevertheless neither posed any threat so I was clicking away as the sky turned red in the sunset. It must have been over 10 minutes until I looked down onto the meadow in front of me – the bison disappeared. I turned to my left. There she was, looking steadily at me while walking closer. The snore over the ridge somehow also disappeared. My intuition told me immediately: it was time to wrap up my shooting.
Although bison do not appear to be aggressive, we did hear multiple “bison attack” stories on the ranger tour just a few days ago. We also saw them dashing in the field like a track athlete. As I retrieved, the two bison also slowly moved forward, occasionally chewing the grass here and there. It wasn’t long after I climbed back to the car when they approached as close as 10 feet away and started to scratch their big heads on a rock. I wasn’t clear what that meant but they walked past our window and finally decided to leave us alone. Whew! What a relief and adventure!