One thing you can always depend on during a road trip is that weather will at some point throw a wrench in your plans. It’s unavoidable. You can either sulk about it or seek out an alternative. Admittedly, I used to get bent about bad weather! It has to be sunny to make any kind of pictures that are worth a damn, I thought! False. When you’re in the mountains it’s always smart to consider snow, but it’s not often that you figure on an October storm big enough to shut down travel! Well, it happened last month when I was scheduled to shoot with a rancher in southern Wyoming on my way from Montana to Colorado. It was a hairy drive from Bozeman down through northern Wyoming and got worse as the night went on. Being October the summer tires were still on my truck which didn’t help matters any. Made it as far as Casper and hit the proverbial wall. Couldn’t keep my eyes open any more so I got a hotel with the plan to wake up at the ass crack in order to arrive at the ranch on time. Only the snow didn’t stop and every which way to Laramie was closed down. Not a single highway or back road to be had. Frustrated but determined not to let it ruin the day I began driving local roads in search of something to photograph. Early on I came upon a local taxidermist shoveling the sidewalk in front of his shop. We chatted for a bit, unfortunately he didn’t have anything going that warranted shooting. No pun intended. When asked for a recommendation he quickly pointed me towards Dan’s Meat Processing about a mile down the road. So I headed directly over there and was warmly greeted by the owner who was more than willing to let me hang out and photograph their operation.
It would have been easy to sit in the hotel waiting out the storm and catch up on some much needed rest, but why? These trips and time on the road are so valuable to me that I don’t ever want to waste an opportunity. Even if that means creating one from nothing. And the images you see here are exactly the kind of thing I would have wanted to shoot anyway! Showing the viewer a glimpse into a world they might not otherwise be familiar with or ever have access to. Being a part of cultures like these never gets old and makes me appreciate the fact that you don’t have to travel to some exotic country in order to experience something different. You just have to look a little harder. I’ve personally never been on an elk hunt. Would like to change that, but my knowledge of them from talking to people in different parts of the country is that you need to dedicate a lot of time to the hunt. Something in the neighborhood of a week seems to be standard in most places. On this morning a guy backed his truck up to the loading door with a massive elk in the bed. I asked him how long he was out before shooting it. “Oooohhh, about 30 minutes”, he said.
