I spent twenty minutes slowly getting as close as safely possible to an elk in Rocky Mountain National Park.

This is my husband fussing at me from the shelter of the car about our differing ideas of safe elk-photographing distances.

I had to crop both of the photos because my telephoto lens only goes so far, so please do not think that I really got this close to either dangerous mammal in real life.

See? Safe distance.

In this uncropped photo, you can see that I am enough feet away from the elk to be able to scream my dying words of "OH CRAP" before its pointy hooves make first contact with my face. Not that this would have happened, anyway, because
1) I am standing under a tree.
2) Elk cannot climb trees.
3) Under the right circumstances (like, for example, a several-hundred-pound piece of wildlife charging at me at speeds upwards of 45 m.p.h.), I can fly up the side of a tree like a spider monkey wearing a rocket pack. Or so I claim in my defense, and will continue to say to weakly counter everyone who has seen these pictures and shared their amateur diagnosis of criminally stupid with me.

Now this, ah. This, my friends, is the giant herd of elk that we drove by at the next bend in the road. I was able to photograph them easily from the car, thus rendering my careful stalking and subsequent spouse-scolding utterly useless.
But it makes a great story.