Men's Journal

Every spring the grizzly bears of Yellowstone descend on the park’s valleys to feast on new grass and newborn elk. Nature documentarian John Shier, armed with an $80,000 camera and infinite patience, will devote every moment of daylight trying to capture the carnage.

by Matthew Power

It is almost June on Swan Lake Flat, a vast expanse of sage and juniper at 7,300 feet in the northern end of Yellowstone National Park, and John Shier is crackling with energy. His knee jitters like a cold-turkey smoker’s, accompanied by a staccato of snapping bubble gum. The fiercest winter in more than a decade has come roaring back to the northern Rockies for Memorial Day weekend, erasing the high peaks and burying the tender shoots of young grass under drifting snow. The wind howls as we sit in Shier’s jacked-up 4×4 utility van in a pull-off along the park road, a hundred grand in digital-film equipment packed in the back. Shier scans the swirling emptiness with a pair of ultra-high-definition Leica binoculars, cursing under his breath. “Where did she go?” he asks. “Goddamn nothing out there.”

Shier is in Yellowstone for four weeks to film a segment for Untamed Americas, a series debuting this spring on the National Geographic Channel. He’s on a tight shooting schedule, and the weather is making Shier’s already difficult job nearly impossible. In recent days dozens of cars and RVs have slipped off the roads between here and Old Faithful, and a rock slide has cut off an immense corner of Yellowstone from the outside world. The snowpack is so deep that hundreds of bison have turned to park roads for their migration, backing up traffic for miles.

Shier is here to record, in high-def glory, a species interaction that has rarely been captured on film. Each spring Yellowstone’s grizzlies descend from their high den sites to dig up the caches of ground squirrels and eat fresh grass on the lower slopes. At the same time, herds of elk follow the green spring growth up the valleys from their winter range in Montana, the pregnant cow elk looking for a good place to birth their calves near their summer pasture. As has happened for thousands of years, bear and elk converge on Swan Lake Flat, and the newborn calves, unable to outrun the grizzlies — who can run up to 30 mph — become the bears’ main course. The elk hunt occurs only a couple of weeks each year and often in places out of sight of where Shier is filming. The bears aren’t hunting for the cameraman’s benefit, so a huge number of variables have to converge to get a shot. “You can see a bear one minute,” Shier says, “then it’ll walk behind a tree and disappear for hours.” Shier has 20 days for the shoot and can’t spare a single one of them. He sets himself an unrelenting pace: 5 am to 9 pm every day. If something happens, he plans to be there to film it.

With the rising popularity of Animal Planet, the Discovery Channel, and a host of National Geographic offerings, viewers have come to expect an ever-increasing degree of closeness to the violence and poignancy of wild animals’ lives, with little sense of the colossal amount of work that goes into capturing those images. “Very few people ever see a grizzly chase an elk, let alone catch one,” says Shier. “To be able to film that is asking quite a bit.”

The bear he hopes will be his main subject is a female grizzly nicknamed Quad Mom. She gained her name, and considerable fame among bear aficionados, by spending the summer of 2010 hunting the flat with four adorable cubs in tow, including a runt named the Nub that would sometimes ride on her back. The grizzly and her cubs have been spotted up here on the flats, but the snow is keeping the majority of the elk herd down in the meadows below the snow line. Shier hasn’t seen Quad Mom for two days and has been obsessively scanning the flat since sunrise, looking for a sign. “They’re out there hunting all day, relentlessly,” says Shier. “We have to have the same patience to get the shot.”

Shier is among a new generation of cinematographers who are elevating wildlife documentary far beyond the Disneyfied reels of the past or the sensationalist theatrics of many new shows. He takes inspiration from the dreamlike visions of art-house recluse Terrence Malick and the unnarrated abstractions of nature seen in films like Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi. He has filmed around the world, from Mongolia to Tasmania, from the Andes to the Canadian Rockies, but his most important work has been here in Yellowstone, the 3,472 square miles nicknamed the American Serengeti.

Shier was a principal cinematographer for 2009’s Yellowstone, the BBC’s three-hour special on the park, and his best sequences reveal a vision of nature that is both intimate and majestic. A pack of wolves harry a bull elk in an icy creek. Bald eagles fend off a skulking coyote from a carcass. A red fox dives for mice in deep snow. On a scree slope, a mother grizzly battles a larger male that threatens her cubs. Time-lapse shots reveal storms boiling up in valleys, shadows gliding past Yellowstone’s striated peaks, steam skirting across its innumerable thermal features. It is hard to watch and not feel utterly awed that such a wilderness still exists, the caldera of a still-active supervolcano, teeming with extraordinary creatures.

To continue reading There Will Be Blood, click here.

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