Last year more than 4 million people visited Yellowstone and this year is on track to top that figure. Many park visitors pack a picnic while touring the Grand Loop Road that circles the park's interior. (Brett French / The Billings (Mont.) Gazette)

First I saw them as small tan blurs, their lanky bodies barely visible behind clumps of bright green bunch grass. I nicknamed them the four amigos, four pronghorn fawns playing together along the Specimen Ridge trail in Yellowstone National Park on a warm June day.

In our short encounter they paused to line up shoulder to shoulder, like cowboys in a Western movie shootout. Fixing me with almost stern gazes it was as if they were saying, “You won’t mess with us if you know what’s good for you.”

Then, pulled away by the prodding of a concerned doe, they flared the white fur on their rumps and slowly ambled off. Not all of the fawns were hers, but they followed as if she were the school teacher calling them in from recess.

Bears

In instances like this, Yellowstone was particularly kind to reveal itself to me this summer while I was working, fishing, hiking and camping. No wonder more than 4 million people chose to visit the park last year.

These photos of chance don’t always find a place within the stories I write, but I would still like to share them with you as a kind of “what I saw this summer that intrigued me” slide show.

For example, the two young black bear cubs that wandered close to the Tower Falls road while I was viewing a peregrine nest at a pullout. At first there were only a few tourists who saw the bears top the hill and then feed closer. But within minutes a crowd had gathered.

The mama bear was fixated on eating newly grown grass, but the cubs scampered up a tree, leapt off in their best swan-dive form and even sat back on a rotten log like a football fan sitting in a recliner. It’s hard to beat bear cubs for entertainment value.

Birds

One of the most unusual sites I saw was a hawk hopping across the gravel Chittenden Road that leads to one of two trails to Mount Washburn atop Dunraven Pass.

I quickly pulled onto the road when I saw the raptor, at first unsure what type of bird it was. It was eyeing something on the ground so intently that even the approach of a vehicle from the other direction couldn’t distract the hawk.

After getting a bit closer I could see that the object of the bird’s rapt desire was a large bug, maybe a Mormon cricket. I’d never seen a raptor eat a bug, let alone be unbothered by the continuous traffic on the paved Dunraven Pass and Chittenden roads, which it was wedged so close between.

That was either one hungry bird, or one tasty bug.

Humans

The other thing that always catches my eye during my Yellowstone visits are the incongruities. In one of the wildest places in the Lower 48 states, you can still see wildlife like a mule deer doe grazing right next to the busy Canyon Village four-way stop.

I can rationalize that the animal may feel safer around all the motorized metal and humans than it would in the forest where there are large toothy predators who want to eat it. But the unaware or distracted motorists must pose some danger, as well — although maybe more so to other tourists than the animals.

The tourists are almost as fascinating as the wild animals in the different ways they act and behave. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in parking lots where we are forced to congregate going to or coming from an overlook, mud pot or geyser. What a rich area for social science observations, like the children I saw crammed into the back of an SUV during a parking lot lunch break.

Put all of these photos together and you have a brief snapshot in time of some of the unusual sights I encountered in Yellowstone this summer that didn’t make it into my other stories. They make me realize lucky I am to have such a photo-rich place right out my back door.