A Great Shot

A mule deer fawn leaps from the cover of Wyoming Wildlife magazine’s most popular issue of the year. Rising star Julia Cook of Cody, Wyoming, snapped the stunning cover shot for this month’s annual photo competition. Cook also won third place for a goat perched on a cliffside along with two honorable mentions.

Few outdoor photographers even make the cut in this competitive publication produced by Wyoming Game & Fish, but Cook’s efforts repeatedly dazzled the judges. Her shots of a moose at sunrise and a grizzly pacing the ice are iconic and well deserving of mention.

Her photography obsession began during Covid when Cook dropped out of college, grabbed her Canon EOS R5, and headed into Yellowstone National Park. Her passion for grizzly bears took hold.

Last year, I attended a talk at the local museum, where Cook presented a slideshow on the various grizzlies she’s photographed. She has identified more than fifty different ones, both male and female, living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, based on their unique markings, fur color, and size. It was from her that I learned how female grizzlies tend to stay near the road system to keep their cubs safe from the adult males. Male grizzlies are skittish of traffic and visitors, so they prefer the remote areas of the park.

Cook has since graduated from the University of Wyoming and is now pursuing wildlife photography full time. This month’s issue is not her first Game & Fish cover, and it won’t be her last.

Over the holidays, Rodeo gave me a wall calendar Cook created, featuring an array of wildlife in the park. He bought it at the local bookstore, Legends, and didn’t know who she was. I, of course, went nuts over the gift. Cook’s ultimate goal is to inspire others to spend more time outdoors. Pretty cool that a young woman in her mid twenties is trying to motivate visitors in this way.

She is committed to “ethical” photography, preferring to keep her subjects wild. In the old days, tourists used to feed the bears to snap pictures of them. Cook has a website, LittleLightningNature.com, where her calendars are for sale and there are other amazing cover shots featured there. She has thousands of followers on Instagram and some interesting videos posted on TikTok. I have no doubt she will go far.

When I emailed Cook this week to check in, I never did hear back from her. No doubt she is somewhere up in Yellowstone hard at work on that next great shot.