As I noted in a previous post, the West was on fire during my mid-August trip to Grand Teton National park. Since Jackson Hole was full of smoke, and the Tetons were almost invisible from any reasonable distance, I decided to spend some time high up on the opposite side of the valley near Togwotee Pass. Exploring the Bridger-Teton National Forest, I trained my camera on nearby subjects that did not require shooting through miles of smoke.
From all appearances, this little unnamed stream running down the mountainside could just as easily have been located in the Cascades rain forest. I think it may be a rare jewel here though, because I never came across another that looked like this.
Near the end of the day, off in the distance I saw a large bird at the interface between forest and a clearing. It saw me too, but by creeping up ever so slowly, I managed to get quite close without scaring it away--close enough to almost fill the frame with my long lens (420 mm equivalent: Olympus 40-150 f/2.8 lens + 1.4x teleconverter on E-M1 body). It was a Sage Grouse hen, in a place that I would not have expected to find one, since most of this area consisted of forest, not sage plains.