It was another rainy, foggy morning for my last day in camp. I decided to go out with the photographers, something I hadn't done yet. Except for the drive in, I hadn't see much large wildlife. That was something the photogs seemed to be good at finding.

Chuck's mission for the day was to find Mr. Bear. What we found first, though, was a small group of Ptarmigan.

We stopped briefly at a lounging bull moose, but as it didn't appear to be a bear, we continued down the park road. We drove all the way to the Toklat River without seeing any more wildlife, not even a beaver. Near the Toklat, our driver Luke said he didn't want to spend all day in the bus, so he forced us out into the tundra for our own good.

We all split up for about an hour. I made my way through dense willow thickets, following a small stream.

After wandering around for a bit, I started making my way back to the bus.

Once we regrouped, Luke drove down to and turned around at the Toklat River bridge. The autumn colors were especially vivid on these east-facing slopes, so we all stopped for some landscape photography.

There were some Dall sheep high in the alpine tundra, but even my 400mm lens couldn't turn them into anything more than large white dots.

The drive back to camp was much like the drive out: no Mr. Bear. We stopped at the same lazy moose, who hadn't appeared to have moved all day. Everyone got out of the bus, set up their tripods, and took pictures of the moose.

One of photographers we picked up at North Face had her motor drive going, and all I could hear from her direction was a steady click-click-click-click-click. What she'll do with a hundred identical moose slides I'll never know. Luke did his best to keep us together as a tight group. He had to go grab one Japanese lady by the jacket; I think she was pretending she didn't understand English when he was yelling at her.