{"id":169118,"date":"2025-07-23T06:28:24","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T12:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=169118"},"modified":"2025-07-23T11:25:38","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T17:25:38","slug":"potpourri-from-my-recent-camping-trip-to-montanas-centennial-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/23\/potpourri-from-my-recent-camping-trip-to-montanas-centennial-valley\/","title":{"rendered":"Potpourri From My Recent Camping Trip To Montana’s Centennial Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"

A little of this and a little of that.<\/p>\n

I thought I’d wrap up last month’s Montana camping trip with a photo dump of images taken in or near the Centennial Valley. I whittled the number of photos down to 20, but that’s still a record for Feathered Photography. I’ll try to keep my narration to a minimum.<\/p>\n

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A Black-billed Magpie taking off in low light. It was lightly raining at the time but I see no evidence of it in the photo.<\/p>\n

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A group of five Black- necked Stilts in flight.<\/p>\n

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There were at least three pairs of Trumpeter Swans with cygnets on Lower Red Rock Lake right in front of my camping trailer. One of the families included three cygnets, one included four cygnets and this pair had five.<\/p>\n

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I felt badly for this pair of Mountain Bluebirds because they’d chosen to build their nest in a nest box with a roof that was broken and hanging down the side of the box. I didn’t have much luck with bluebirds on this trip. Maybe that’s because…<\/p>\n

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their nest boxes tended to be in such spectacular country I was often distracted by the view. If you squint you may be able to see a bluebird on this box. And there I was, taking landscape photos.<\/p>\n

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It was easy to be distracted by the scenery. This view is right behind a very birdy spot and I’m taking landscape photos again.<\/p>\n

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A Franklin’s Gull in breeding plumage.<\/p>\n

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I photographed this Savannah Sparrow again and again over the three days I was there. ‘She’ would reliably appear in the same area to hunt insects for her chicks. Several times her beak was so stuffed full of insects I could barely see her face but none of those photos were very good.<\/p>\n

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A pair of American White Pelicans on Elk Lake. For this photo the contrast was so extreme I had to have my EV (exposure value) set at -3, which is as low as it will go on my Canon R5. Even then I had a hard time taming the whites during processing.<\/p>\n

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As I left Elk Lake and returned to the nearby Centennial Valley I had another spectacular view of the Centennial Mountains.<\/p>\n

When I’m in this area I always try to visit Wigeon Pond, which in this photo isn’t far behind the shaded, sloping hill on the left. But on this trip I was never able to visit the pond because…<\/p>\n

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of one of the unfortunate effects of staff cuts to our National Wildlife refuges.<\/p>\n

When I tried to visit the pond (twice in two days), the gate was open but this sign greeted me at the gate so I never entered the area. After the first time, I asked a refuge employee about it and she assured me that the area was open to visitors and I must have misread the dates on the sign. So the next day I went back and documented what the sign said with this photo.<\/p>\n

When I showed the photo to the new refuge manager and another employee, they were both surprised and I believe a little shocked, that the sign was there because the pond area was supposed to be open. The mix-up was apparently caused by staff cuts and the resulting work overload of employees. They were embarrassed and said the sign would be removed immediately but by then it was too late in my camping trip for me to visit the pond.<\/p>\n

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A Killdeer trying to distract me from its nearby nest. I left the area immediately.<\/p>\n

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This is a photo of the Lower Lake Campground taken from more than 3 miles away. That’s the Gravely Range in the background and the much more impressive Centennial Mountains are behind me. The tiny dark spot on the bottom left is the campground kiosk, the bathroom is in the middle and that’s my camping trailer on the right. I had the entire place to myself for the nearly 3 days I was there.<\/p>\n

We can’t see Lower Red Rock Lake because of the rolling terrain and because the lake was lower than usual because of a recent partial failure of the dam but…<\/p>\n

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part of the lake was right in front of my trailer, as we see in this pre-dawn photo taken just as I was leaving camp to look for birds. There was lake fog that morning but by the time I left camp the fog…<\/p>\n

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had drifted west in front of some mountains.<\/p>\n

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It didn’t take long for the fog to mostly dissipate.<\/p>\n

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A pair of Pronghorn bucks soon after the fog was completely gone.<\/p>\n

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A White-faced Ibis coming in to land on the shore of the lake.<\/p>\n

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A Short-eared Owl in low light, soon after takeoff from a fence post.<\/p>\n

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I’ll close (finally) with a photo that attempts to document how my camping trip ended. On my third day there, the forecast was for rain and more rain so I tucked my tail and headed for home. This photo was taken very early in the morning as I was attempting to reach pavement (Interstate 15) before this storm hit from the west.<\/p>\n

This is the South Road while it was still barely wet so it looks pretty good. But I still had many miles to go before I hit pavement, I was pulling the trailer, the road gets worse up ahead and the storm was approaching fast.<\/p>\n

Long story short, things got dicey before I climbed Monida Hill and reached I-15. Generally, when I’m on birding trips I’m not a fan of pavement but this time I was damn glad to see it. The pucker factor of pulling a trailer on wet and slimy dirt roads will do that to you.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A little of this and a little of that. (20 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,1493,360],"tags":[553,7865,2228,2638,7867,7866,7770,263,7863,7864],"class_list":["post-169118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge-favorite-locations","tag-centennial-mountains","tag-cuts-to-national-wildlife-refuge-staff","tag-elk-lake","tag-exposure-value","tag-lake-fog","tag-lower-lake-campground","tag-montanas-centennial-valley","tag-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge","tag-south-valley-road","tag-wigeon-pond"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/bluebird-box-and-centennial-mtns-2250-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-HZI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169118"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169270,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169118\/revisions\/169270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}