At summer’s end, I am reminded of my second grand learning experience with a Lilly Fellowship, a pilgrimage four years ago to places where wild horses still thrive in America.
My favorite pictures were of a “pool party” at the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in South Dakota. An old cowboy named Dayton Hyde has made sure horses are provided with a home in which to live out their lives.
There are others. In the Pryor Mountains of Montana, a small herd exists on more land than the Black Hills Sanctuary. It is rocky terrain, so many more acres must be allocated per animal.
Descendants of Spanish mustangs brought to America in the sixteenth century (notice the dorsal stripe on this one’s back), bid us goodbye from the top of a cliff.
In Cassoday, Kansas, ranchers get subsidies from the Bureau of Land Management to provide space, feed and water to horses shipped in from the West.
The barbed wire fence is a reminder that though the horses are wild, they are not free.
Go to http://www.studywildhorses.wordpress.com to see more photographs and details from the journey. The story starts at the bottom and goes up.
The Amazing Bird Collection 
So you did TWO Lilly Fellowships? That is marvelous! I will have to explore the horse site sometime. That’s something I know nothing about.
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Yes, you’re allowed to apply for another one after seven years, so I got one in before I retired. We loved traveling in the West and watching the wild horses.
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Wow Margaret. I loved this blog! I’m a big horse fan and these pictures are incredible. Did you take them? They’re amazing. So beautiful. This sounds like a wonderful trip.
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Yes, I took them. I used our daughter’s camera with a zoom lens I was able to buy with money from the grant. It was a memorable trip. We would like to go back to the horse sanctuary in South Dakota, especially.
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