As a two-hour drive down washboard roads through the pitch-black west desert darkness wrapped up, we arrived at the trap. Daybreak illuminated the Confusion Mountains, home to a herd of just under 500 wild horses, marking our destination in central-western Utah.

The rising sun made the dust blowing behind a trailer glow gold as three Bureau of Land Management employees, three wild horse advocates, and myself parked our cars to begin the short hike to the ravine where we would view the Confusion Herd Management Area gather.

BLM officials call such a roundup a gather. Gathers are a part of the cycle of wild herd management.

Every year since the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was passed by Congress in 1971, the Bureau of Land Management rounds up herds of wild horses across the West using low-flying helicopters to reduce populations down to the appropriate management levels on rangeland.

Managing wild herds not without controversy

Advocates have protested the removal of wild horses from rangeland for decades, citing long, physically taxing and traumatic helicopter chases, the separation of family bands, unnecessary euthanization, overcrowded holding facilities where horses are never adopted, and — due to loopholes — the risk for these federally protected horses to end up in the slaughter pipeline.

“After Congress tasked the BLM and the Forest Service to manage healthy wild horse herds on healthy rangelands, we quickly learned that a wild horse herd can actually double in size almost every four years and they can quickly outgrow the range’s ability to sustain them,” Heather Tiel-Nelson, office of communication public affairs specialist at the BLM, said. “So at that point it becomes really important that the horses don’t suffer, the range doesn’t suffer and that we gather those excess animals so that we can manage healthy populations on healthy rangelands essentially.”

“Here on the Confusion Herd Management Area, they are nearly four times over what the appropriate management level is and that is a range from 70-115. That is the goal of this gather, to gather about 360 (horses),” Tiel-Nelson told me from under the reprieve over her umbrella, a few hours into the gather, when the sun was at its highest.

Before our departure from the Maverik gas station in Delta at 5 a.m., Bureau of Land Management employees had the group of observers in attendance sign a paper that, among other rules, made the signer promise to behave respectfully during the gather. This was the first day of the Confusion Herd Management Area gather, on Aug. 24, following a contentious 21 days full of heated verbal confrontations between wild horse advocates and BLM employees near Cedar City at the Bible Springs Complex gather.

Debate in the desert

What transpired was close to 10 hours of respectful debate in the desert heat. The discussion included two public affairs specialists at the BLM, one BLM incident commander, a photographer observing for herself — but who typically works for the American Wild Horse Conservation — her husband, and another advocate observing on behalf of Wild Horse Education, The debate rang on as they watched the privately contracted Sampson Livestock wranglers and helicopter pilots guide 35 wild horses into a secured area.

Melissa Strickland, documenting what happens at the gather for Wild Horse Education, has been a horse lover her entire life. She grew up with horses, and rode them all over the country, eventually working as a cowgirl for many years. In April 2024, she adopted a wild horse and has been training him at her home in Parowan. She wants to see wild horses preserved.

“I definitely don’t like to hear about the deaths. I don’t think anyone does. They are OK out on the range and they come in and get euthanized because maybe they have an eye deficiency or something like that and there’s a part of me that feels like they would’ve been fine living out their days out there. Again, I don’t have all the information, knowing exactly what the water and the forage is,” she said.

“That’s why I am here: to learn more, look for solutions and listen to what the BLM’s experience is and what they are trying to work through. I try to stay in a neutral position so that I can really be an observer, so that I can learn and understand,” Strickland said after spending the better part of the morning in conversation with Tiel-Nelson.

From our view, tucked away in a ravine out of the horses eyesight, we could see about half the trap. Every time the whir of the helicopter grew louder, all parties ceased conversation and raised their hands to their cameras, ready to document the horses crossing from wild to captured.

At the end of the day, the 35 wild horses captured on the first day of the gather stood in a temporary holding corral, a piece of cloth dividing them from the contractors on the other side, before being sent to a privately-owned wild horse holding facility in Delta, and ultimately put up for adoption to the public.

The Confusion Herd Management Area gather ended on Sept 1., with 309 horses gathered over the course of nine days.

According to officials, there were two pre-existing/chronic deaths where a blind horse and a horse without teeth were euthanized and one sudden/acute death where a horse had a fractured head/neck, and the rest were sent to the Sutherland Off-Range Contract Wild Horse Facility in Delta, where they are prepped for BLM’s wild horse and burro adoption and sales programs.

Beyond that, their future is uncertain.