While scouting for the perfect North Yellowstone hotel property, to conduct my photography tours from I discovered the perfect place. My new home away from home in Northern Yellowstone where eclectic meets old country charm is the 7 Point Ranch. Access to the Yellowstone River is just a walk out the back door, and Yellowstone National Park is only 25 minutes up the road.

7 Point Ranch offers the comforts of home on the banks of the legendary fly-fishing destination, The Yellowstone River. The lodge is a repurposed trophy home, not as a bed and breakfast, but better. The well-appointed rooms have shared common living rooms and kitchens for the guests. You won’t experience that “trapped in a hotel” feeling because you have a living room and kitchen at the end of the hall stocked with some food items and coffee.

Lodge hosts Cheryl and Howard Jones are extremely helpful and full of Information. Cheryl’s hobby is keeping up with wildlife activity in Yellowstone and is a wealth of information about where to see the critters. She also can be hired to show them to you.

As a nature photographer, for reasons that are incomprehensible to me, my wife prefers to skip the 4:30 am landscape/wildlife photographer’s call to duty and prefers to sleep in until I return for her in the late AM. The 7 Point Ranch helps my marriage by, instead of putting a coffee pot in my room, putting a kitchen at the end of the hall. Attached to a living room/dinning room where I can catch the morning news over coffee while my wife snoozes undisturbed.

From the tastefully decorated rooms to afore mentioned well-equipped common areas. My favorite room has a fireplace in it with a cool fire screen with an elk/grizzly bear enhancing the cool mountain ambience.

After my wife’s leisurely slumber, in my absence she enjoyed the cool and funky town of Livingston Montana is just a short way up the road made famous in the Jimmy Buffet song “Livingston Saturday Night.” Day two she enjoyed horseback riding arranged by Cheryl.

My wife was disappointed that the soon to be completed Golden Ratio Spa, Salon and Wellness Center hadn’t yet opened for the summer season. The main room of the spa is shaped like the golden ratio diagram. Famous works of art such as the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and The Birth of Venus, among others, are all rumored to have been composed based on the Golden Ratio. This semi-round room would have been a construction nightmare I’m glad I had no part in building, but it looks really cool, which is why I factor the Golden Ratio into my photography. Maybe I can send my slow photography learners to the spa and have the Golden Ratio massaged into their scalp at the end of the day.

I look forward to my next Yellowstone photo tour, but even more so to the fishing trip where I can indulge myself at the 7 Point Ranch instead catering to the needs of others. As a former fly-fishing guide, I am anxious to return to experience fly-fishing from the fly-fishing from the 7 Point Ranch.