09/22/2026
The sky rolled out the welcome mat on my first evening in South Dakota.
After five years working on the ranch, I can just tell when a good sunset is brewing. The clouds line up over the Black Hills, the horizon fills with dust or water particles, and the sun starts to dip just so.
I loaded up on the side-by-side with my telephoto lens and headed to one of my favorite spots on the south side of the ranch.
I call them the “tiny badlands,” red-orange-yellow hills where ancient seafloor, weathered and stained with iron, meets younger clays made largely from volcanic ash. My goal was to spot a bachelor bison, or two, and catch them in the good light.
I arrived to the ranch mid-rut. Many of the male bison had cried uncle, left the drama of the herd, and gone off to lollygag around the ranch’s 27,000 acres solo. Over the years, I’ve even come to know a few of them and their distinct personalities.
This fine gentleman and I ended up playing leapfrog through my study areas the entire time I was there. His personality: perpetually annoyed. Specifically, by the swarm of flies that encased his flanks. Every other insect seemed to struggle this year, but the flies were as brutal as ever.
I found him just in time. I swear he rolled his eyes and shot me a dirty look, then turned to lumber up into the hills. But as he crested a patch of buffalo grass, he stopped, posed, and time stood still. The setting sunbeams made a stellar glow around him and through the fly wings (look closely under his belly).
We could have stood there watching each other for 20 seconds, or an hour, I’m really not sure.
The next day, when I arrived at my favorite study area (shhh… don’t tell the others), there was my lone buffalo friend. I named that spot “Painted Hills” for its iron oxide hues: hematite for the reds and rusts, goethite for the yellows and oranges.
To rid himself of the flies, he had been wallowing in the red, orange, and yellow sand. Mixed together, they made a peach-colored dust, and he was covered in it from tip to tail. Everything but his brown eyeballs and nose holes. He looked like a giant peach, so I called out, “Oh, hey, Peaches!”
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