October 8, 2025 – Yellowstone National Park
Hunt’s Photo Adventure with Don Toothaker
I really don’t know what it is.
This fascination I have with oneness — and now, apparently, with threesomeness.
It started as a curiosity. Then a musing. And now my attraction to the culling of the few from the many has become a full-blown, untreated condition. If there’s a support group, I haven’t found it. Probably because they’d only allow three members.
Perhaps it’s reminiscent of the Three Wise Men.
Or more likely — the Three Stooges.
Or maybe it’s simply three companions on a lifelong sojourn, rooted together against the wind.
These three stood quietly in the valley along the Yellowstone River — not silhouetted against the sky, but grounded in the heart of the land. The river flowed gently in the foreground, its surface reflecting the late-day light like liquid glass. Behind it, three trees stood in perfect, imperfect balance.
The smallest was in the middle, flanked by two elders who seemed to lean in just slightly, as if to protect it. Their trunks rose from the meadow like a chorus of endurance — survivors of storms, droughts, and time itself.
Whatever the cause, they caught my attention — no, they anchored it.
I started to wonder why three feels so right. Why my eye, my lens, and my spirit seem to settle when a scene resolves into a trio. I began a list of things that come in threes — and it’s already two pages long. But that list of scientific and symbolic trios couldn’t explain what I felt in that valley.
Because those weren’t just trees.
They were spirits.
Perhaps the first tree, on the left, holds the Spirit of the Hunter — steady, alert, grounded in awareness of all that moves through the valley.
The second, the Spirit of the Healer, stands smaller but centered — the heart of the three, offering balance and calm.
And the third, perhaps the Spirit of the Dreamer, leans ever so slightly, reaching toward light and change.
Together they seemed to embody the essence of the people who once called this land home — the Shoshone, Crow, and Bannock — tribes who understood that every tree, stone, and current had a soul. Tribes who lived not above nature, but within it.
The breeze carried whispers through their branches, soft as a story being retold.
The water in the foreground rippled with reflected motion, as if the spirits themselves were breathing.
And there I was, camera pressed to my cheek, thinking I was taking a picture.
But maybe I wasn’t capturing them at all.
Maybe they were capturing me — reminding me that even in stillness, the land speaks.
And sometimes, it speaks in threes.
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