Montana rancher integrates helicopter into his operation

Gathering cattle with a helicopter
Gathering cattle with a helicopter in Montana. Photo by Kari Greer.

This is not a fire aviation story, but it involves a Bell 206-L4 and a photographer who is well known in the wildland fire community.

Vertical Magazine has an interesting article about a Montana rancher who flies a helicopter as part of his regular ranch activities, at times doing things that would normally be done by a cowboy on a horse. One of the best things about the article is that it has 14 photos taken by Kari Greer who spends her summers on the fireline with firefighters, taking great photos. Examples of her work can be found at Wildfire Today.

Here is how the article begins:

Loretta Lynn once sang, “There’s a built-in troublemaker in every man.” That may or may not be true. But there is undeniably a built-in troublemaker in every cow, and on this bluebird May day in west-central Montana, the troublemaker is acting up in the black heifer who is darting in and out of view through the chin bubble in Bill Galt’s Bell 206L4 LongRanger helicopter.

I’m riding along in the left seat; Galt is in the right, using his L4 to urge a dozen cow-calf pairs toward a crossing of swampy, overgrown Birch Creek. Or trying to. Every time Galt gets the bunch moving in the right direction, the unruly “dry” heifer, who doesn’t have a calf to slow her down, leads them off in a wrong one. Thirty feet above the ground, Galt is doing his best to head her off, maneuvering the LongRanger back and forth like a particularly quick and nimble cowhorse. Reinforcements soon arrive in the form of Galt’s nephew’s wife, Tanya Hill, on an actual horse, but the heifer only redoubles her efforts to evade us…