I’d been traveling around the US and Canadian National Parks for years before I saw much in the way of Bighorn Sheep anywhere. The first good shots of bighorn sheep were taken up at Logan pass at Glacier National Park. They would come out up there in the mornings to lick the salt and supposedly antifreeze off the parking lot. Since the parking lot is surrounded by mountain scenery, some awesome bighorn ram photo could be taken around the edge of the parking lot, particularly when the rams would stand up tall, sometimes on a large rock and strike a majestic pose.
Usually around the time of the rut in late fall or early winter, the bighorn rams battle for the right to mate with the females. These battles can be epic to watch, quite violent and some of the rams do end up with cracked horns a blood running down their faces. While late fall is the most common time to see this behavior, sometimes they will battle at other times of year. I’ve seen them brawl in the middle of the roads and up in the hills of Lamar Valley in Yellowstone in the spring.
After years of never seeing bighorn rams and then only seeing them wander around, I was staying at Teton Village outside of Grand Teton National Park. In addition to Grand Teton, the National Elk Refuge is located on the outskirts of Jackson, Wyoming. While it is obviously more well known for the massive winter elk migration, I’d heard that bighorn sheep tend to hang out there as well.
This particular year I’d planned to spend the winter exploring the Canadian Rockies but a Canadian border agent refused to let me into Canada without providing any reason. After driving from Philly all the way out to the Peace Arch border crossing I was forced to make other plans for the late fall and winter. The Teton/Jackson area has a hostel that was relatively affordable back in 2016 and the sights are typically still pretty cool that time of year so after a little time up around northern Washington state, I headed down to the Jackson/Teton Village area by Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
The weather was cold, a bit snowy and overcast. The landscape views weren’t all that great out in Grand Teton National Park. I’d go out for sunrise some mornings and come back and snooze. When I heard their might be bighorn sheep over at the Elk Refuge, I went over there are few afternoons. The first few days, there were bighorn sheep off in the distance and up on the hills away from the road. There were some not so good very distant shots to be had but nothing great, at least not with a Canon 7D and a 100-400 lens.
On one of the last days I stayed at the Teton Hostel, I spent another afternoon up at the National Elk Refuge. There were lots of bighorn sheep. There were lots of bighorn rams. Those rams were battling!
On that particular day, the bighorn rams were down in the valley not too far from the road. They would stand around in mixed sex groups with the males clustered together and kick each other in the groin. Every fifteen minutes or so a pair or a couple pairs of the rams would rear up on their hind legs while facing each other and smash horns. The sound of the impact would echo off the mountain peaks surrounding the National Elk Refuge.
Photographing bighorn rams as they battle can be a challenge. They move quickly, the battles generally last for a split second and there is little warning and therefore little time to frame up a shot before the action happens. Ideally you would have a camera that would shoot at least 10 frames per second along with a buffer to handle more than 10 shots and a chip that could handle massive data dumps from the rapid fire shooting that is very helpful when photographing fast unpredictable wildlife action. Unfortunately the Canon 7D was not the ideal camera for this scenario. Rapid fire shooting would often cause the camera to lock up and stop shooting while data was being written to the memory chip in the camera.
For much of the afternoon I was able to get some still shots and some not so good action shots. About 30 minutes before the sun dropped down behind the mountains, the “bighorn brawlers” strolled up to a high point in the valley along the road through the National Elk Refuge. As they had been doing all day, they stood around kicking each other in the groin as they glowed in the late afternoon sun.
Right before the shot was taken, it appeared that the rams paired off and split into two teams. It was as if the bighorn brawlers from Teton came down to square off with the bighorn bandits from Yellowstone. Just as the shadows started to rise up to where the rams were standing, the two pairs reared up. I adjusted the zoom and hoped the camera would crank off enough continuous shots without locking up to capture the action. As I held down the shutter button, the shots started flowing. The buffer and the chip struggled to keep up with the data flow and it did stop shooting during some of the action. Just as quickly as the battle started it ended. Then the rams fell into the shadows and dispersed. I had no idea whether or not I’d captured what I’d observed through the camera viewfinder.
Upon returning to the Teton Hostel, I plugged the chip into the laptop. With a mix of anxiety and anticipation, scrolled through the shots on the chip to see what I came away with. While the camera wasn’t fast enough to capture the entire sequence of the battle, it did capture one classic moment that almost perfectly filed the frame and has made for some awesome bighorn prints all the way up to 40×60 metal prints. I’ll probably never capture another shot with with near perfect scenery and late afternoon light. While the Canadian Customs folks ruined plans to spend a winter in the Canadian Rockies, had it not been for that this shot would never have been taken.
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