Horseshoe Park and Sheep Lakes

Author's Comments

The valley opens up as you come in through the Fall River entrance and the first thing that strikes me is how much sky there is. Horseshoe Park is a glacial floor, flat and broad and held on every side by mountains, and the Mummy Range across the meadow gets the kind of morning light that photographers chase for years in other places. Pink at first. Then gold. Then the ordinary blue of full day. The sheep are the reason most people stop. From late May into August they come down from the high country to lick minerals at the edge of the lakes, usually in the first hours after sunrise, and if you have the patience to sit in your car with a long lens and wait, they will eventually appear. Three hundred millimeters is the minimum. Longer is better. Do not approach them on foot. The whole point of the mineral licks is that the sheep have chosen to come to this particular place, and the photograph that matters is the one where they are behaving as if you are not there. But I want to say something about the meadow itself, because I think it gets overlooked in the rush toward the wildlife. At dusk in September, when the elk start moving and the aspens on Deer Mountain are turning, Horseshoe Park becomes one of the quietest landscape compositions in the park. Wide foreground. Distant peaks. A bend of the Fall River catching the last light. No drama. Just a valley settling into evening. That is a photograph worth making even if no animals walk into the frame.

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