I spent the summer and fall of 2020 social distancing on the road, visiting and camping in National and State Parks and National Forests in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. I’m sure you’ll remember that not a lot of amenities were open then. I mostly ate what I cooked and cooked what I could find in local stores (masks required, don’t enter if you are feeling any symptoms of anything, stay 6 feet apart, follow the one-way arrow stickers on the floor, limit one bottle of hand-sanitizer and one package of TP to a customer), so I was pretty self-contained. My itinerary was flexible and I was ready to change things up if something cool presented itself.
In July I was camping in a forest service campground just outside of Glacier National Park exploring the area through day trips, and going into town for supplies, gas, and to check email every couple of days. On one of these shopping trips, I found that the ferry service on Flathead Lake had just opened and was again offering socially distanced trips to Wild Horse Island State Park. There is no camping on the island, so I made plans to take the first ferry in the morning and the last one in the evening, giving me about 14 hours on the island. Since this was my first time visiting the park I wasn’t sure what I would find or how difficult it would be to navigate the trail system (really easy, as it turned out).
What I found was that the name is a bit of a misnomer. There are wild-ish horses on the island, but they are brought there periodically to maintain the small band of five wild horses, a gelding and five mares. They were beautiful but it was a hot July day so, like reasonable horses everywhere, they were gathered in a shady valley standing head-to-tail swishing flies and not moving around much. For me, the real treasure of Wild Horse Island was the large herd of Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep scattered around the island.
The herd was divided into ewes and lambs in one area and rams in another. The ewes and lambs seemed happy to lie in the tall grass on slopes overlooking Flathead Lake where a brisk breeze was blowing, and the rams were on the interior, alternately grazing and lounging in the shade. Because of the number of human visitors the island gets the sheep were not terribly shy, but there is a hunt each fall to keep their numbers from outgrowing the limited habitat, so they were still plenty wild and suspicious of humans. So I spent my day happily following the rams around the island, observing their interactions and behavior.
Probably because most sane people were staying safely at home, I had dozens of bighorn sheep all to myself for the entire day, peacefully going about their business just a couple dozen meters away from me. It was noteworthy to see that while the horses relied on their tails to shoo bugs away the rams were attended by flocks of brown-headed cowbirds who took a much more direct approach to pest control. The weather was changing, with a chance of rain overnight, which would have been welcome as Montana was suffering from a moderate to severe drought at the time. The sky was covered with high, dense clouds that worked like a giant soft box creating a muted, warm light without much contrast.
My approach was simple. I would find a band of rams in a good location and sit quietly on the ground or a boulder at a respectful distance with my camera on the tripod in front of me until they decided to ignore my presence, and then I slowly started working. I ended up shooting about 1500 exposures, as it turned out. (I really hope I’m not the only photographer who does this to themselves.) Since then I’ve worked through these images several times in Capture One, my preferred RAW processing tool, and I’m still not done.
At any rate, these are just a few photographs from that gray July day, in the middle of the pandemic, with the bighorn sheep of Wild Horse Island.