{"id":168750,"date":"2025-06-23T05:46:40","date_gmt":"2025-06-23T11:46:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=168750"},"modified":"2025-06-23T07:50:05","modified_gmt":"2025-06-23T13:50:05","slug":"the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-from-my-montana-camping-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/23\/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-from-my-montana-camping-trip\/","title":{"rendered":"The Good, The Bad And The Ugly From My Montana Camping Trip"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: Some readers will likely be annoyed when they try to read today’s post. Two days ago, while I was working on this post, my screen suddenly jumped and after that the entire look of my blog had changed. The text is smaller and even the photos look a little different. It only effects my blog – nothing else. At the time I wasn’t even using the keyboard or the mouse so something weird must have happened with WordPress.<\/em><\/p>\n

So far I haven’t been smart enough to fix it myself so I may have to get some help. In the meantime, apologies to my readers.<\/em><\/p>\n

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I’m home. It was an adventure.<\/p>\n

I came home a day or two early because of a huge winter storm system approaching western Montana. On Thursday evening I was rocking and rolling inside my little trailer with wind gusts I estimated to be 60-70 mph (growing up in Montana I’m pretty good at estimating wind speed) and it was raining when I got up Friday morning. The forecast called for rain on Friday and Saturday and snow on Sunday, so I decided to tuck my tail and head for home, arriving Friday afternoon. I still believe that was the smart move.<\/p>\n

But it was glorious while I was there, mostly. Weather was good to excellent most of the time but the wind picked up each afternoon.<\/p>\n

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Wind would normally put a damper on bird photography but in one magical spot I found, huge flocks of phalaropes and stilts, and smaller groups of other birds, took advantage of the wind and literally cavorted in it, providing me with many hours of entertainment and photo ops for flight shots over several days.<\/p>\n

This is one of the smaller flocks of Wilson’s Phalaropes that were playing in the wind, which allowed me to get the entire flock in the frame. Most flocks were much larger.<\/p>\n

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Wind sometimes helped with individual birds too. The wind slowed this White-faced Ibis down, so I was able to get quite a few frame-filling shots of this bird as it was coming in to land on the shore.<\/p>\n

Touring the huge Centennial Valley was like seeing an old friend again and I found and photographed a fair number of interesting birds during the process. I also had visits with some interesting people who play vital roles in the Centennial Valley, including at Red Rock Lakes NWR.<\/p>\n

For this report I’ll divide the things I want to mention relative to the trip into three categories – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.<\/p>\n

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The Good:<\/p>\n