In a dark abandoned cave near Yellowstone National Park, its mouth sealed by snow much of the year, a small weatherproof wildlife camera kept watch for 10 years.
Quietly, fully powered and improbably intact throughout the decade, that Reconyx Ultrafire trail camera recorded grizzly bears coming and going. Mountain lions, too, slinked by. Coyotes paused, curious to investigate smells left behind by others. Marmots nested, brave in the company of apex predators.
Last year, when Casey Anderson finally returned to the cave where he’d set up a camera back in 2015, the now-50-year-old wildlife photographer had low expectations. Ten years is a long time for anything mechanical to survive in the wild. And that particular camera hadn’t been top of mind for Anderson, a National Geographic Explorer who’d become a father of three since planting the trap. “We figured we’d be lucky if we found anything at all,” he told Mountain Journal in a recent interview.
A naturalist and filmmaker, Casey Anderson became a familiar name around Greater Yellowstone 22 years ago, when he cofounded the Montana Grizzly Encounter rescue and educational sanctuary near Bozeman. He launched the not-for-profit to provide a proper home for Brutus, the orphaned grizzly Anderson adopted in 2002 after saving the cub from euthanasia at Yellowstone Bear World, a controversial drive-through wildlife park located near Rexburg, Idaho.
“I got to grow up here and basically do exactly what I’ve done my entire life. I’m still just that kid who flips over logs and sticks his head in holes; I just do it with a camera now.”
Casey Anderson, filmmaker
Anderson and Brutus formed an extraordinary bond, which was documented in National Geographic’s Expedition Grizzly. While the bear passed in 2021, Brutus remains a potent muse, driving Anderson’s curiosity about the highly intelligent, oft-misunderstood species. In fact, Anderson initially ventured into the Greater Yellowstone cave mid-backcountry expedition to find out whether grizzlies reuse the same den, winter after winter.
“Most people walk by a cave like that and don’t want to know what’s inside,” says the fifth-generation Montanan who now calls Paradise Valley home. “I’ve always been the person who wants to know; who sticks his head in the cave.”
Caves, Anderson explains, provide more than shelter. They’re message boards safeguarding scents. Animals mark them, revisit them, check what’s passed through. Inside that nexus — cool, windless, protected from weather — a camera trap could wait in near-stasis, activating only when something enters the frame.
“It’s like a trail cam inside a refrigerator,” Anderson says. “Very little happens — until something does.”
What came of that particular cave quest wasn’t just rare footage of bears denning. Anderson’s camera trap functioned as a time capsule that captured more than 200 videos across multiple species and seasons. Taken together, they reveal that the cave functioned less like a private den than as a hotel, attracting various tenants for many reasons: refuge from storms, escape from heat, a place to socialize. The footage offered a compressed decade of life inside Greater Yellowstone, an ecosystem Anderson knows intimately.
“I’m such a lucky guy,” he says. “I got to grow up here and basically do exactly what I’ve done my entire life. I’m still just that kid who flips over logs and sticks his head in holes; I just do it with a camera now.”
After studying wildlife biology at Montana State University, Anderson built a reputation through that instinct to explore and look more deeply into places that typically inspire fear. Working with the likes of National Geographic, the BBC and the Discovery Channel, he’s spent the past three decades documenting grizzlies and other large predators, often by positioning himself where science, storytelling and risk overlap.
More recently, through his own YouTube channel, “Endless Venture,” Anderson forged a direct line to audiences hungry for something slower and deeper than viral wildlife spectacles. The bear-den footage went viral anyway. When he posted a short clip to Instagram, the video racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
But the cave was never meant as a stunt. That footage was born of curiosity. And while it supports Anderson’s hunch that grizzlies return to their favorite caves, it’s not just a bear video. Mountain lions are nearly as prevalent. Countless coyotes pass through. The marmots practically put on a soap opera. Anderson’s reveal tells a story of animal use, and of animal individuality.
The camera’s recorded patterns counter an enduring myth Anderson has spent his career pushing against: the idea that wild animals are simple, predictable, interchangeable. “We do this thing where a bear is just ‘a bear,’” he says. “But they’re individuals. They have personalities. And they’re interacting with each other all the time.”
To that end, Anderson draws a comparison closer to home: dogs. “No one believes dogs are all the same; we canine-morphize all the time,” he says. “We know some are lazy, some social, some reactive, that no two we’ve ever met are the same.”
Wild animals, he argues, are no different — they just happen to be much less observed. Put a camera in one place for 10 years, however, and those individual traits and complex interactions become obvious.
“You start to see who tolerates who, who avoids who, who shows up when,” Anderson says. “Some animals know each other. Some don’t get along. Some are afraid. Some are curious. There’s a lot going on that we flatten out, because it’s easier. We don’t have to face the harm we’re doing to nature when we ‘other’ animals.”
Flattening, Anderson believes, is one reason fear and ignorance around wild animals persists. Mountain lions, in particular, occupy a place of mythic menace in the American imagination. Anderson knows they’re watching — trail cams confirm it — but also that if they truly wanted to harm humans, they could seize ample opportunities.
“They watch you all the time,” he says. “If mountain lions wanted to eat people, we’d be in trouble.”
That oddly comforting truth emerges only through long observation. And those tools allowing photographers like Anderson to step back and watch without intrusion — thermal cameras, starlight cameras, remote traps — are quietly expanding our notion of earthly experience.
“There used to be this divide — scientists thought filmmakers sensationalized things; filmmakers thought scientists couldn’t communicate. That’s changed.
Casey Anderson, filmmaker
Driven by frustration at what he was missing when he couldn’t record, Anderson began building his own remote recording systems long ago, before technology rendered them widely available. “Half the day used to be a mystery,” he muses. “Now we’re just starting to see what happens at night.”
The footage Anderson gathers doesn’t stay siloed. Over time, he says, his relationship with field biologists and park scientists has become increasingly collaborative. He calls them when he sees something new and they listen. He shares footage, they provide context and data.
“There used to be this divide — scientists thought filmmakers sensationalized things; filmmakers thought scientists couldn’t communicate,” he says. “That’s changed. Now it’s more like one plus one equals three.”
Still, the work of rendering what’s wild in intimate footage and photos carries emotional weight. Anderson estimates the beauty he’s witnessed to exist in equal measure with the brutality. He has laughed and cried and been left deeply shaken.
He recently fell in love with a pair of lion cubs, only to watch them get eaten by hyenas hours later. “I don’t suppress it,” he says. “If you’re not emotionally attached, you’re not telling the full story.”
He shared with Mountain Journal one story that’s never stopped troubling him. One early spring, he encountered an emaciated elk cow separated from her herd, trapped between two logs and crying out. Overwhelmed by her suffering, Anderson put her out of her misery — quickly, using a rock.
Later that night, doubt set in.
“What if a starving wolf had heard the cries of that elk and connected the dots?” he asks. “What if that was the meal that saved it and taught its pups something important? What if the thing I really needed to kill in that moment was just the pain in my heart?”
The moment forced Anderson to confront the limits of compassion. At what point does intervention serve the intervener more than the ecosystem? In what ways are humans part of nature, and when are we unwittingly distorting what’s natural?
Those questions, of course, don’t come with clean answers. But Anderson’s also privy to sublime moments — triumphs that can balance out the grief. Anderson’s favorite memory in the wild, for instance, had nothing to do with predation.
In South America’s Patagonia, after weeks of tracking a female puma, he watched her rise from a day bed and freeze, staring skyward. For minutes she stood transfixed, unmoving. Anderson assumed she was stalking prey or watching a bird.
Then he realized she was gazing into the full moon rising over the mountains.
“That hit me hard,” he says. “It had never even occurred to me that she could just be appreciating it.”
The moment recalibrated something in him. After all the violence, the patience, the loss, here was an animal pausing — not to hunt, not to flee, not to freeze — but to look.
Back in Greater Yellowstone, the cave footage offered a quieter version of that revelation. Not drama exactly, but a richer and more nuanced understanding of animals. A place reused, repurposed, shared across species and years. A reminder that the ecosystem is not static, but relational. And that attention spans may be short, but that ecosystems don’t work that way.
“I want to let stories breathe,” says the man who helped a cave tell its decade-long story. “To spend more time following a place or an individual over time: That’s where a story’s power is.”
