If you’ve followed my blog this year then you will have seen these two photos already. The photo above was taken on my first morning into Yellowstone after the park finally opened for the summer season. Stormy skies coming in from the west usually means the weather’s not going to be great and before I finished photographing this scene, I did get wet from the rain. But it’s not very common to see a rainbow in a morning sky with beautiful sunrise colors. I thought perhaps it would be a good open for the summer in Yellowstone but it ended up being one of only three times in the park that produced photographs. However, each of those three days are represented in this five part series, so it wasn’t too bad!

This photo made the list because of several reasons. Martens are cute, though they can also be pretty mean, so keep a distance! The pose was pretty good considering it was the only photo I was able to take at the time. And the effort put in to capture this one image was fairly substantial. Ironically, a marten, possibly the same one, paid a visit to our backyard on Christmas day!