Mid Sierra Musings: Endangered Sierra Nevada Bighorn Sheep 2020

Dale Matson

Click On Photographs To Enlarge

Endangered Sierra Nevada Ram

Sharon and I had an opportunity to spend a couple of days in the eastern Sierra Nevada canyons from Lone Pine to Big Pine. These are some of the places the endangered sheep hang out in the winter to find better grazing and get out of the snow and cold.

Additionally, I bought a new Sony 200-600mm lens and put it on my Sony A7R4. With a 1.4 TC this gave me quite a reach especially when cropped. Even cropped, the files are big. I was very happy with the performance and used boulders as my tripod.

Monday was an overcast day but it has advantages in how the photographs come out in some ways. Sharon and I hit a couple of new places and one old place to no avail. We just couldn’t find any sheep using our 10X binoculars and were getting discouraged. Our feet were wet from hiking in snow.

The last canyon we went to, I finally spotted a group of sheep and we stayed there till near dark. The following morning, we stopped by Steve Yeager’s (the Sheep Whisperer) place and we told him we were going up Pine Creek above Rovana. After glassing that area with no sightings, we met Steve and Moose his Grand dog in the place we found the sheep on Monday. After being there until about noon, we decided to look for some Tule Elk but first we were going to check the canyon to the south. As it turned out, we found more sheep and decided to climb up as far as we could to get closer shots and get a better angle.

It is difficult when you are 75, a mile up and have to climb with the weight of a big lens and camera but sheep fever had taken me up these steep slopes before many times. There was one ram in particular I wanted to get closer to.

All in all, it was a great two days and we even photographed and filmed the Tule Elk which were not far below us near the road back to highway 395.

We then headed back to Fresno and arrived home about 8:30pm.