THE PRYOR MOUNTAINS LIE ALONG THE WYOMING-MONTANA STATE LINE, about 13 miles north of Lovell, Wyoming, and 40 miles south of Billings, Montana. Rising to 8,822 feet, East Pryor Mountain materializes out of the desert like a dull beige mirage. From a distance, the looming monolith offers dismal prospects, appearing as a hulk of dusty rock and sparse, dry vegetation. Such is Nature’s sleight of hand.
On September 9, 1968, Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall officially designated 33,600 acres of Montana and Wyoming as the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range; today it includes approximately 39,650 acres between the Crow Indian Reservation and Custer National Forest. Although much of the terrain is too steep, rocky, or barren for wild horses to graze, its remoteness and inaccessibility preserve the isolation these mustangs have always known.
THE PRYOR MOUNTAIN WILD HORSE RANGE, established in 1968, predated federal protection of wild horses by three years.
The Range includes high desert, rocky ridges, and semi-alpine slopes. Along the eastern boundary the Bighorn River carves through red rock and dun-colored soil, alive with sage and juniper, grasses, wildflowers, and forbs. To the west, Sykes Ridge and the Tillett or Burnt Timber Ridge rise up roughly 5,000 feet to converge at the top of the mountain with the vast Big Coulee Canyon yawning between them. At their southern base pockets of grass surround scant water holes. These different habitats separate three herds, with little interaction among them.
Reaching the top of the mountains is not for the faint of heart — or vehicle. There are several roads up: the rutted and ragged Sage Creek Road from the north, the rugged and jagged Burnt Timber Ridge Road to the southwest, and the incomparably frightful Sykes Ridge Road to the southeast. The easiest way to view horses is from the paved and scenic Bad Pass Road (Transpark Highway) that meanders through the length of the Dry Head.
Sage Creek Road gradually reveals a splendor undetectable from the desert below. Although it is snowbound much of the year, by late June wildflowers flood the wayside in waves of deep blue and purple, rippled with sudden yellow, white, or pink swells. Deep green cover swallows the land away from the road’s edge, and nary a trace of beige is to be found. Burnt Timber Ridge and Sykes Ridge wind through craggy, rock-strewn, ledge-hopping corners and sudden drop-offs before opening to the grandeur that awaits up the mountain.
At the top the views cascade into unadulterated, soul-expanding awe. These mountains, once known as Baahpuuo Isawaxaawuua (“Hitting the Rock Mountains”) to the Crow (or Absarokee) Indians, became a sacred site long, long ago. Part of the Holy Land of a very spiritual culture, they remain the site of vision quests to this day. The scenery is spectacular, wildlife abounds, and there is a windswept newness in the air.
Descending, 200-year-old Douglas fir forests give way to sloping meadows that look down, out, and over the mere earthbound world below. The mountains seem to float above it all, unattached to the blur of a world left behind. Crow traditionalist John Pretty On Top described this place as “a cathedral without a roof, without a wall, it is forever, as far as you can see is what He has given you … that is how I see that mountain.”
This diversity belies an even more colorful distant past for, until about 50 million years ago, there were no mountains here at all, only a vast and strangely populated sea. The high country still yields marine fossils. It is this strange, harsh, and rugged environment that helped form the remarkable character and temerity of the mustangs.
JUNE FINDS WILD HORSES working their way up the ridges to the plateaus in search of newly sprouted grass and forbs.
A LONE STALLION surveys a vast and varied landscape.
THE CLIMATE IS AS CHALLENGING AS THE TERRAIN. At times the wind roars so relentlessly in the mountains that it tears away conversation between people standing only a few feet apart. Gusts of up to 70 miles per hour are not rare. In winter those winds bring blizzards. In summer they work with the sun to parch the open meadows.
Rainfall is sparse in the lower elevations — less than five inches per year — but on the mountain as much as 20 inches can drizzle, sprinkle, and hammer, bringing on the lush abundance of spring.
Snow falls nearly nine months of the year, often mounting to nearly three feet at the top and persisting there through June. Exposed ridges and mid-to-lower elevation plateaus are swept snow-free by the wind and the low winter sun’s rays. Few weeks of the year see the mountain awaken to less than a sparkle of frost, even while the scrublands below sear in the summer heat. Warm weather brings biting flies, hailstorms, thunder, and murderous lightning. In recent years, drought has brought new challenges to the foraging horses, as well as to other wildlife and to land managers.
