A MOTORCYCLE ROUNDUP
Words by Justin Duyao | Photography by John Hebert
In collaboration with Iron and Resin
—
I’d only been to Montana once before, on a road trip with my parents. Way back when, it took about five days to drive from our home in suburban Portland to my first year of college in middle-of-nowhere Arkansas.
At my dad’s behest, we followed I-90 through Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, bopping into bait shops in Missoula, Butte and Bozeman in search of news of brown trout migrating upstream late that summer. In the end, we spent two days fly-fishing on the Yellowstone River and, while I don’t remember catching anything, I do remember how wild and vast that place seemed. How cold that glacial water felt around my legs.
More than a decade has passed since that first encounter with Big Sky Country, but I’ve always kept Montana tucked safely in the back of my mind—how clear the night sky was above Flathead Lake or how clean the air smelled on that riverbank near Livingston. For this reason, saying yes to the invitation to return to Montana to “spend a few days on a bison ranch” was a no-brainer.
As an Oregon native living in San Diego, I’ve always assumed the West Coast was as good as it gets. As the destination of the Lewis and Clark expedition, for example, the Pacific Coast always felt like the crown jewel of “the West.” Flying from San Diego to Missoula, however, made me realize very quickly that there’s a lot more to the Western frontier than I realized.
At first, all you see from the window seat of the plane are the arid lowlands of the Columbia Basin. But soon, spindly tendrils of river valleys carved by snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains, which neatly divide Idaho and Montana, how wild and vast that place seemed. How cold that glacial water felt around my legs.
More than a decade has passed since that first encounter with Big Sky Country, but I’ve always kept Montana tucked safely in the back of my mind—how clear the night sky was above Flathead Lake or how clean the air smelled on that riverbank near Livingston. For this reason, saying yes to the invitation to return to Montana to “spend a few days on a bison ranch” was a no-brainer.
As an Oregon native living in San Diego, I’ve always assumed the West Coast was as good as it gets. As the destination of the Lewis and Clark expedition, for example, the Pacific Coast always felt like the crown jewel of “the West.” Flying from San Diego to Missoula, however, made me realize very quickly that there’s a lot more to the Western frontier than I realized.
At first, all you see from the window seat of the plane are the arid lowlands of the Columbia Basin. But soon, spindly tendrils of river valleys carved by snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains, which neatly divide Idaho and Montana, begin to partition the plateau into subtly rolling hills. And then, all at once, it’s the Rockies themselves—icy-blue mountain lakes; craggy scars of gneiss, schist, amphibolite and quartzite; and little birdshot mountain towns galore.
After some dramatic turbulence, we arrived in the heart of that paradise of granite and pine. But, of course, our heading wasn’t Missoula itself. It was 63 miles to the northwest, where a place called Hightail Ranch is nestled into the upper slopes of the Salish Mountains overlooking Plains, Montana.
Over the next four days, I was to join Hightail’s team of ranchers, hospitality staff, family and friends for the “Super Bowl” of ranching, also known as the yearly roundup. Like most ranches, Hightail leaves their livestock to graze on the open plains for a majority of the year. Right before the onset of winter, however, the whole community gathers together to corral the herd, after which ranchers typically brand-new calves and separate market-ready steers.
The roundup at Hightail, though, is a little more complicated.
Nowhere on the tens of thousands of acres of Hightail Ranch will you find a single horse. Nor will you find any cattle to speak of. In the place of horses, there are dirt bikes; and in the place of cattle, there are 200-odd bison (or “American Buffalo,” as they’re commonly called).
Founded by U.S. Air Force veteran Jonathan Sepp, Hightail Ranch is a regenerative ranching operation, focused both on preserving bison, which are considered a “near threatened” species, and restoring the grasslands they graze.
“From the moment I saw my first bison, I knew this was what I wanted to do,” Jon told me that first night. “My dad was an officer in the Air Force, so we were constantly moving. I remember on one of our first cross-country moves—I think I was 4 or 5—we were driving across Montana, and my mom stopped the car to climb over this fence and take a photo of a wild bison. At one point, I got out of the car and joined her. Ever since then, I’ve been enthralled with them.”
While serving in the Air Force himself, Sepp saved every penny he made to buy his dream ranch. In 2013, he put his plans into action, buying a small parcel of land southeast of Hot Springs and eight bison from a rancher on the Crow Reservation.
“We built this ranch from scratch,” Jon said. “It’s thankless work, but it’s incredibly important work, too.”
While bison are no longer technically an endangered species, it wasn’t long ago that they teetered on the brink of extinction. When European settlers first arrived in the Americas, plains bison numbered in the tens of millions. By the close of the 19th century, however, their population had been culled down to a few hundred.
As bison were actively fundamental to the economy and society of the Indigenous peoples settled in the Interior Plains of North America, they were a clear target for ranchers who wanted to clear land for their cattle and the federal government that wanted to push native peoples off of it.
This quote from the memoir of Lieutenant General John M. Schofield sums up the U.S. Army’s sentiment: “With my cavalry and carbined artillery encamped in front, I wanted no other occupation in life than to ward off the savage and kill off his food until there should no longer be an Indian frontier in our beautiful country.”
The result was devastating. Not only to the Indigenous peoples, whose nomadic lifestyle depended centrally on bison, but also to the Great Plains region, which depends on ruminants to cultivate its grasses. Today, the prairie, steppe and grasslands of North America have lost nearly one-third of its prime topsoil and, in terms of geography, been reduced to less than 5 percent of its original area.
However, because of individuals like Jon and his team, there is hope.
“Today, about 90 percent of bison are privately owned, while 10 percent are protected by the government. If private ranchers were to stop what we’re doing, bison would go extinct in a generation,” Jon explained. “This may be private land, but our herd is a public resource—both because of the food we provide by taking good care of these animals, but also because of the ways they operate as ecosystem engineers, shaping healthy and diverse ecological communities.”
After Jon explained all this to me, the “Why” of bison ranching made perfect sense. The “How,” however, wouldn’t make any sense until after that first day.
After a quick breakfast, we made our way to the lodge, which overlooks the upper pasture where the bison were lazily grazing, as well as the valley into which we were to push them into that morning. Doing so, however, would not be easy.
Bison are an incredibly resilient animal. Despite being the closest relatives of domestic cattle native to North America, every civilization that has attempted to domesticate them has failed. Weighing anywhere from 880 to 2,200 pounds, their thick hide, blunt horns and razor-sharp instincts protect them from just about every environmental threat. In every way, they are as wild as wild comes.
Taking into account the massive hump on their backs, designed to help them dig through several feet of snow to reach wild grasses in the winter, they may seem an ungainly animal. Not to mention that, at a trot, bison move a lot like cows in a bit of an awkward cantor, with their front and rear hooves together. At a gallop, however, a bison glides across the open plain like a horse—head level, nose pointed forward, legs outstretched. At full speed, they can exceed 40 miles per hour, outrunning any and every vehicle on challenging terrain.
For this reason, herding them with horses is impossible.
“If we were to herd bison with horses, it wouldn’t be a question of ‘if’ they’d kill the horse but ‘when,’” said Hightail Ranch manager Michael Weaver. “Aside from their ability to pivot on a dime, even at full speed, they’re built a bit like a truck.”
When the time came to move the herd off the highland pastures, where the bison spent the summer beneath the shade of alder trees, down into the lowlands, where Jon built his corral, everyone gathered in the gravel lot behind the lodge like a cavalry regiment, preparing for battle. However, with dirt bikes replacing horses, it felt more like a scene out of Mad Max than any Western I’ve ever seen.
In addition to Jon, who would lead the charge on a vintage Yamaha XT550, the group of riders included Hightail Ranch foreman Greyson Marsh on a Honda XL250; Thom Hill of Iron and Resin, on a KTM 450; Zach Sudfeld, a close friend of Jon’s, on a Kawasaki 250; and Michael, who preferred a quad over a bike.
For my own safety, I was entrusted with a four-wheeled (and comfortably caged) Polaris and joined by photographer John Ryan and cameraman Mason Charles, who wanted to get as close to the action as possible. After an inspiring “good luck, don’t die” speech, the lot started up their engines and headed for the upper pasture.
For context, you should know that herding hundreds of bison on dirt bikes isn’t, per se, a refined process. Even though Jon has been at it for years, every second on the back of his bike is different from the last.
“As quickly as a bison takes off in one direction, they can turn—45 degrees, 90, whatever—in an instant,” Jon explained. “I don’t care how good a rider you are, not even dirt bikes are agile enough for that kind of maneuver.”
As such, our first attempt to move the herd was about as chaotic as you might expect. Almost immediately, the group split in two, forcing the riders behind them to divide and conquer. Though we were able to push the larger group down the hill and toward the corrals, the smaller group, headed by a particularly stubborn bull, decided to smash through the electric fence to the south and continue downhill, past the corral and into the valley below.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” Jon yelled into his radio, speeding over the hill and after the bull.
After a few seconds, the dust settled, and we saw the bull climb and quickly disappear behind a farther hill, and Jon, now a significant distance behind him, reached the crest and stopped.
“He’s gone,” he huffed, turning around.
Several other attempts to round up the herd followed this one—each of them wilder than the last. During one push down a particularly steep hill into a gulch, one rider’s bike stalled and nearly fell on top of him. Since he was within a few feet of the herd, if they had decided to turn on him, he’d have essentially been helpless. On that same run, so many individual pairs of bison had made a mess of the attempt to consolidate the herd and so much dust had been kicked up that we lost all visibility for a moment. All you could hear from my vantage point was what early settlers described as “distant thunder.”
On another day, Jon’s dog Teddy ran out to join the herd, sending those of us watching from the lodge into a flurry. These kinds of variables made each attempt at herding the bison its own unwieldy beast.
“In this business, you keep your head on a swivel,” Jon said. “Always.”
When dealing with bison, it’s best not to assume you have the upper hand. Even when you’re joined by five or six ranch hands, when you’re pushing the herd from one pasture to another, the herd will only move if they want to.
“Even though they’re electric, these fences are really more of a suggestion,” Greyson told me while repairing the section the bull had busted through the day before. “If a matriarch happens to escape and wander off, the herd is going to follow it, regardless of fencing.”
That happened, too, later in the week, when a stray cow led about half the herd (124 of them, to be exact) through a gap in the fence, up a steep hill and into a neighboring field. Jon found out about it only after bumping into a 1,400-pound bull outside the lodge one morning, at least half a mile from where he was supposed to be. That hiccup would delay things by at least half a day.
In fact, even after attention had shifted away from herding and toward the work in the corral, there was always at least one group of bison that had either wandered off or deliberately escaped.
“Elk and mule deer also have a habit of taking down these fences,” Greyson continued. “I’d say 75 percent of the work is repairing the fence. There’s so much of it, too. I spend most of my time out here alone. It’s meditative, in a way—the remoteness of it all.”
After breakfast one day, I asked Jon about the kinds of people that thrive in an environment like this.
“Anybody can be a cowboy for a day. I get hundreds of applications for volunteers to come work the ranch, but I know less than 1 percent of them would last more than a week,” he said, sipping his coffee. “Sure, everybody has fun on their first day. But the only people that last out here are the ones who are able to look beyond the mythology and romance of ‘The West.’ People with bulletproof character.”
As it happens, nearly all of Jon’s ranchers are veterans.
“I hire a lot of vets because I think they understand what it means to be a part of something bigger than themselves,” Jon continued. “It’s a lifestyle. You either choose that lifestyle or you don’t. And that’s something you can only really see in a person after a few months of work. Only then do people realize this isn’t summer camp. Nobody is watching. Nobody cares.”
If you haven’t gathered this yet, bison ranching isn’t easy. As exciting as roundup season is, it’s incredibly dangerous, too.
“Bison are ‘fight or flight’ animals,” Michael told me during a break at the corral. “Huddled together in these corrals, we’ve taken away their flight response, so all they can really do is fight.”
And fight they did. From afar, an active corral sounds like a barrage of small arms fire. Up close, it sounds like you’re in the middle of a war zone. When pushed from the wider corral into the hold, where a group of 20 or so bison is whittled down to five, the bulls will start charging and kicking the steel walls. At one point, Jon described a bull that was so large and so angry that he bent and nearly broke through one of the steel panels trying to charge him. Considering those panels weigh anywhere from 75 to 120 pounds and require several ranch hands to move, that is unimaginable.
Above the clatter of claustrophobic bulls are the voices of the ranch hands, who hang over the tops of the steel walls, shouting “This way,” “C’mon,” “Watch it,” “Close that gate,” “Open, open,” “Move it,” and using cattle prods to turn the bison around and usher them from one chute to another. Because of the commotion, you’re guaranteed to walk away covered in either dust or mud, depending on the day.
At the end, there is the squeeze, where a bison’s head and body are both secured, making room for one ranch hand to tie a rope around the bison’s horn, pulling their head to the side while another punches a sensor into their ear, which allows Jon to collect health data, track their movements, etc. Once they’ve been tagged, they’re released into a separate field, where most of them shake their shaggy manes and trot off.
After working out the kinks that first day, things began to work like clockwork. Jon and Zach and Thom would, with outstretched arms and deep-throated grunts, push the bison from the corral into the hold, while the rest of the crew, including Thom’s fiancée, Laura, and Michael’s wife, Nichole, and Jon’s daughter, Syndi, would open and close knife gates to isolate individual bison and prepare them for the squeeze, where Greyson and Michael handled the most dangerous section.
On days when we had a smaller crew, one person would operate several knife gates at once, and Jon, with all the bravado of a champion matador, would enter the larger corral alone, atop his bike. On those days, to get the herd’s attention, he’d rev his engine and kick up chunks of dirt with his rear tire before charging the rear of the herd, pushing the rest into the narrow alleyway outside the hold and then quickly closing the gate behind them. He made it look easy.
Of course, everything doesn’t always go according to plan. At one point, after a massive bull flipped himself over while trying to jump over the side, trapping his head in a gap between the dirt and the wall, Greyson braced himself on the top of the pin and tried to dislodge the bull with his boot.
“This is easily the third most dangerous thing I’ve ever done,” he said in a chuckle. And then, afterward, to himself: “Hail Mary, full of grace …”
The following day, three yearlings were trapped in the hold with a particularly anxious bull, who charged each of them in frustration, goring one of them—lifting it into the air and slamming it into the wall.
“This is part of it,” Jon said, after we separated the bull and filtered the remaining yearlings through. He climbed into the hold with his Colt .45 in hand. “Even when we do everything right, we still lose calves.”
If you were wondering, Jon has been gored himself. The day before I arrived, a bull had even hooked its horn under his leg, leaving him with a limp for the rest of the week. Even after the number of injury stories he told me that week, I can’t imagine how many countless close calls he’s experienced.
When I jumped into the wider corral at one point to help out, I came face to face with a cow whose calf I’d landed a little too close to. The mama pivoted to face me, snorted, and charged. If I hadn’t been close enough to the wall to jump on it, I’d have been toast. At another point, after a failed attempt to separate a few bulls from the herd in the corral, there were so many of us trying to escape at the same time that the walls began to lean inward, threatening to collapse. Luckily, no one was hurt, but those kinds of moments get my heart racing, even now.
Once outside the corral, bison are allowed to return to their preferred state of being, which is close to each other and as far from humans as possible. Viewed from an abutting hill, they look almost exactly like cattle—the little ones, especially. They have the same buggy eyes and scraggly tufts on their foreheads. It isn’t until a few years of growth that bison develop their more distinguishing features, like their shaggy manes that stretch from the top of their hump to their elbows, stubby horns and bulbous snouts. Each of their features serves a specific purpose.
“Because of the thickness of their hide, bison don’t feel any significant change in temperature until minus-40 degrees,” Jon told me one day.
As a keystone species, bison form the backbone of the grasslands ecosystem. As they graze, they stimulate the grasses they eat to expand, widen and deepen their root systems, which act as a carbon sink. After they deposit dung, dung beetles will pull the nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, sulfur and magnesium into the ground, nourishing microbes, plants and other animals.
On the backs of bison sit Black-billed Magpies (or “buffalo birds”)—the “Montana uber,” as Greyson called it—who feed on insects the bison stir up while grazing. These birds also help deposit seeds across the grasslands. Through these lush, wild grasses run field mice. In nearby bushes, rabbits and chipmunks make their nests near creek beds, which are allowed to thrive, since bison prefer grasses found in the uplands, compared to cattle, who are known to be destructive around sensitive waterways.
“We even have a few grizzly bears who have returned to the area,” Michael told me while pointing at the ridgeline above us, which is carpeted in forest that turns hazy blue as golden hour ends. After the sun sets and the moon rises, packs of coyotes celebrate their return to the grasslands.
Looking down at the shivering prairie that night, I finally realized how important a place like Hightail Ranch is. Along the horizon, healthy clusters of pine trees are beginning to reclaim portions of the hillsides that European settlers once bulldozed. Down below, dense, shrubby bushes hug the banks of the Clark Fork River, where everything from walleye and whitefish to smallmouth bass, Northern pike and several varieties of trout can be caught throughout the year.
Hundreds of years ago, the Flathead Salish and Kalispel peoples wintered their horses in this valley. Back then, they survived harsh winters by hunting bison, fishing for salmon and foraging. Though these vibrant grasslands still represent the most vulnerable ecosystems in the U.S., because of the work of ranchers like Jon, this land is recovering.
“I’m not sure a ‘Save the Grasslands’ slogan would get very far with your average suburban voter, who just finished mowing their perfectly healthy ‘buffalo grass lawn,’” Jon told me, leaning on a fence post and looking out at a few plots of lands he hopes to buy to expand the area where his bison are able to roam. “But the reality is that there’s work to be done. And, whether the rest of the world joins me or not, I’m going to keep doing it.”