The Lamar Valley is called the Serengeti of North America — and standing at its rim on a day like this one, watching a herd of bison move through the golden autumn meadows below while storm clouds build above the distant ridgeline, it is easy to understand why. The Lamar Valley Herd captures that experience in a panoramic landscape image of exceptional breadth and atmospheric depth: a large bison herd strung out across the valley floor in the characteristic loose, unhurried formation of animals that have been making this journey across this landscape for thousands of years, the dark bodies of the animals tracing a living line through the golden grass that is at once entirely specific — this herd, this valley, this particular afternoon — and entirely timeless, the same image that would have greeted a Crow warrior or a mountain man or a Shoshone hunter standing on this same rim in any century before the great slaughter reduced the bison from tens of millions to near nothing and back again to the thriving herds that move through Yellowstone today. The rolling hills of the northern range rise and fall in great sweeping curves that give the image its extraordinary sense of landscape scale — the dark conifers on the upper slopes, the golden grass of the valley floor, the grey-green sage of the middle slopes, the distant ridgeline catching the last of the storm light against a sky of deep, dramatic blue-grey. The composition is wide and generous, the herd occupying the lower third of the frame in a way that gives the vast landscape above and around them their full due — this is as much a landscape image as it is a wildlife image, the two subjects inseparable in the way they always are in the best Yellowstone photography. A natural companion to Valley of the Bison — Hayden Valley, Yellowstone, The Ancient Echo — Bison Fine Art Portrait, Ice King — Yellowstone Bison Fine Art Portrait, and The Young Bull — Yellowstone Bison Fine Art Print, The Lamar Valley Herd stands as the most panoramically complete and landscape-grand of the Yellowstone bison images — the herd in its full ecological context, moving through one of the most extraordinary wildlife landscapes on earth. Available as a limited edition of 50 worldwide on ChromaLuxe Metal, Lumachrome HD TruLife Acrylic, or DuraPlaq® FloatPlaqs. Photo © copyright by Tamara Gooch.

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