A grizzly bear (the black dot in the middle of the photo) walking near the treeline in Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley.

The quiet of my evening wildlife watching was suddenly broken by a thick Boston accent. “Oh my gawd! Look! It’s a grizz! That’s the last animal I needed to see! It’s a grizz!”

He was right. Lumbering across the valley was a big dark shape that could only be a bear. It was not very close, being little more than a dot moving along the distant treeline, but through the zoom lens of my camera it was just possible to make out the hump that distinguishes black bears from grizzly bears. It was the closest I would get