A young red fox waits for its mother to return to the den with breakfast. This one was taken down in Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware.

When I first started researching the polar bear trip, I googled “eye to eye with polar bears.” This led me to the Seal River Heritage Lodge. Along with its sister lodge, also on the Canadian tundra, it seems to be the only place in the world where you can safely photograph bears at eye level while on foot. The vast majority of polar bear trips are from large “tundra buggy” vehicles where you’re 20 feet up, or from a ship, also looking down from a great height (not a very good angle at all for photography). You stay on the ship or on the tundra buggy the whole time you’re viewing the bears. We hiked with the bears. Sometimes getting extremely close. For safety, we stayed together, all 15 or so of us. If the bear moved toward us, the first line of defense was for the guide to throw rocks. Bears hate to be touched and the rocks really seemed to freak them out. When that didn’t work — and it didn’t a few times — the guide would use a little gun to shoot what was essentially a fire cracker at the bear. This did the trick the few times the bears came too close. The third line of defense is a shotgun, but the guide said that thankfully he’s never had to resort to that. The experience really was incredible to be able to get that close to bears in the wild, and from the ground. One of the guys in our group had done a tundra buggy tour five years earlier and said that the two experiences don’t even come close. For this photo, I was laying face down on the ice, camera on the ground, about 40 feet away. The bear kept a watchful eye on us as he settled in for a nap.

The constant rising and falling of the tide, along with the freezing temperature creates a landscape of ice covered rock formations along the coastline of the Hudson Bay. These three images were taken at low tide early one morning before we went on our first hike in search of bears. As it turned out, a hike wasn’t necessary. I had to quickly grab my backpack, tripod and other gear as three adult males came walking directly toward us.

It was very, very cold on this particular morning. Very cold. And windy. But as much as we were all doing our best to protect ourselves from the weather, the bears seemed to be enjoying it. Every time the wind whipped up, sending granules of snow flying through the air, this bear just raised his head, stuck his face into the wind and took it all in.

With all due respect to monkeys and other creatures of the world, I’ve been told to keep the polar bears coming, so here’s yet another. Of the three bears that we saw most often, this guy was the odd man out. He was smaller than the other two and they kept chasing him off whenever he got too close. In this photo, he was standing to check on their whereabouts as they were foraging behind some nearby rocks. I also liked that I was able to capture his breath on another very cold day.

Here’s another of the rams I saw last weekend in Colorado. This guy had a particularly nice set of horns.

It was the end of the day when we spotted this polar bear taking a nap. He seemed quite content to be lying there on his back on a bed of snow.

On Friday I went to the eastern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and was surprised to see that there wasn’t any snow on the ground. The next day I tried the western entrance and was greeted by a completely different story. Everything was covered in white, including these two little islands of pine in the middle of a cloud of mist on Lake Granby.

When I have the chance and the time, I like to experiment with these kind of slow shutter speed, motion blurred effects. I recorded this one last Saturday afternoon up in Georgetown, Colorado. The bighorn rut was in full swing, which is the best time of year to see the male rams. The rest of the year they remain in bachelor herds high on the mountain, while the ewes and babies graze at lower elevations.  It also helps that during the rut the males are so focused on the business at hand — mating, or in most cases, trying to mate — that they’re much more tolerant of a close approach. I had already gotten plenty of action freezing shots of the mating ritual that morning (usually a male chasing a female around in circles until she finally tires and succumbs, or until he finally tires and moves on to the next possible taker — but more on that in a future post). The point is, I was satisfied with what I had, so I decided to try and blur a few by slowing the shutter speed to a 1/15th of a second, placing the active focus sensor on the ram’s eye, and then steadily panning the camera with the action while releasing the shutter.

On the ice, in the willows, and along the shoreline, these two bears were constantly play fighting as they passed the time waiting for the bay to freeze. They may not have eaten anything substantial in months, and once frozen, the bears can finally move out onto the ice to hunt for their favorite food source, ringed seals.