A Recovery Effort Goes Right

Story and Photos by Kris Millgate

The wind screams at me through the seam of the truck door. The more the wind wails, the less I want to get out.

I’m in the truck of Gerald Walters, a wild sheep data collector for Idaho Department of Fish and Game and U.S. Forest Service. He’s unfazed by the snowstorm as he rolls down his window to glass the peaks.

“Bighorn sheep like high, rocky, what I call nasty country,” he says. “They’re up in the middle of God’s country, on top of the world.”

The country he’s referring to is central Idaho’s Lost River Range, near Mackay. It includes ten of Idaho’s highest peaks and they’re all above eleven thousand feet. I admire the peaks in the summer. I’m afraid of them in the winter.