PHOTOGRAPHING BIGHORNS : Desert Survival Is 1st Step to Finding the Elusive Sheep

It’s the dead of summer in the heart of desert bighorn country. I’ve been out here for two days and haven’t seen a bighorn yet. I often stop to scan the steep rocky canyon walls with my binoculars, but sweat keeps dripping into my eyes. Cicadas scream from roasting catclaw bushes. A thermometer stuffed far back in the shade of a large boulder reads 122 degrees.

I’m now miles from the nearest road and my pack feels heavier than ever. The rocks are too hot to sit on, and the slightest shade, the next swig of water, have become near obsessions. I’m carrying a gallon and a half of water, an oversized telephoto lens, and a growing doubt. Even if I do find bighorns, it is midday now and the light is past its photographic prime.

To keep going, I remind myself of more productive days. Like the time a desert bighorn ram allowed me to follow within camera range for two days, sleeping barely 100 yards away, and then met with a herd of ewes and lambs at sunrise. Or the times that I’ve had to back off because the bighorns were too close to focus on with my telephoto lens. Or the time I watched a herd of 12 sheep take turns devouring a barrel cactus only 22 feet away from me.

But I also remember when I backpacked for four days in 117-degree weather, only to lose much of my film to the heat. Or the time I lay back on a shady boulder with my feet elevated on a rock while recuperating from a hot walk and finding, upon opening my eyes several minutes later, a rattlesnake coiled under the rock my feet were on. It did, however, give me the opportunity to photograph the quiet creature without disturbing it.

The time spent following the bighorns has taught me many things. I learned to keep a towel wrapped around my camera to keep the sun off and to store my film with frozen water bottles. And that I will have more close encounters with the sheep and see them at times of the day when the light is more interesting if I hike into the hills rather than wait near a watering hole. I have learned not to move like a predator, not to look too interested in them. Sometimes, breaking eye contact and walking away to calm them.

Today, there is no eye contact to be broken.

Finally the shadows lengthen and I find shade under a huge boulder on the canyon wall. The temperature dips a little, lizards come to life, and a gape-mouthed, droop-tailed roadrunner moves among the rocks and brittlebrush. The smell of summer night comes on, bats echo-locate, and a full moon is coming to light the desert tonight.

I’ll have no bighorn encounters today, but the desert, in spite of its fragility, has shown me a beauty of harshness, intensity and delicacy that often goes unappreciated in milder months.