The Steamboat Pilot & Today

Steamboat Springs — If you think tracking wolves in Yellowstone National Park for days at a time is a crazy idea, you’ve never talked to nature photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen. That guy knows how to sell it.

“My favorite thing to do is be out there with animals,” Mangelsen said, explaining the subtle practice of staying out of the way long enough to assimilate into the wintry backdrop, capturing all colors of wolves against a blank, snowy canvas.

“My favorite images that I strive for are animals within the landscape, and I think that’s why this panoramic book is so important to me,” he said, describing his method and recently released book, “The Natural World.”

On Saturday, Mangelsen will stop in Steamboat between assignments for a reception and book signing at Images of Nature, the Lincoln Avenue gallery space that exclusively shows his work.

“The Natural World,” Mangelsen said, basically is a 20-year retrospective on a literal world’s worth of work. It’s all panoramic, opening from the top instead of the middle to give maximum exposure to images of polar bears and penguins. They’re images from his favorite places in the world — and Mangelsen has been a lot of places.

“The Serengeti is probably my overall favorite landscape, seeing the wildebeest migration and all the predators that go with the wildebeest migration,” Mangelsen said.

“It’s the combination of landscape and certainly the biodiversity of species. Like in the Serengeti, when you have more than 1 million wildebeest migrating. As far as you can see, you see them migrating, and along the edges, you see a pride of lions sitting and waiting to go hunting,” he said.

“It’s just a natural wild place, and there aren’t that many left anymore.”

Denali National Park in Alaska, Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone in Wyoming, Canada’s Hudson Bay and South Georgia Island in Antarctica are up there too, topping Mangelsen’s list of some of the last truly natural, if not untouched, places on earth.

He maximizes his time in these remote locales by researching ahead of time, taking advance precautions or going for repeat visits to learn how to judge how animals behave and avoid breaking their natural flow.

“You can always make a mistake and get yourself in trouble. I try to always err on the side of being very careful,” Mangelsen said, quickly adding that any level of caution can leave you to your own devices on occasion. He’s learned to run from a moose — and has — but not to run from bears. He’s learned to tread lightly around big, carnivorous beasts. He hopes to use the fruits of those lessons as a teaching tool.

“I just hope that my photographs inspire people to protect wild places and speak out for nature and for the environment. That’s one of my goals in my photography — not only to be enjoyed by people but also inspire them to protect wild places,” Mangelsen said.

“I continue to be amazed by the natural world.”