Running for Their Lives: Documenting Colorado’s Wild Horse Roundups

Photographers: Diana Hulet, Scott Wilson

Videographer: Scott Wilson

Writtten by: Diana Hulet, Scott Wilson

Photojournalists Scott Wilson and Diana Hulet documented the 2026 Colorado wild horse roundups for We Animals. In this firsthand account, they share what they witnessed.

Scott: Sand Wash Basin

The morning the roundup at Sand Wash Basin began, heavy rains rolled in. I watched Granite and the ten other horses in his band–Boulder, Pequena, SandWhip, Malachite, WhipStone, Feldspar, Citrine, GreyHawk, Ronan, and Crusader–weather the storm. I knew what would happen in just a few hours. Granite and his band did not.

Years ago, the horses of Sand Wash Basin inspired me to pivot my photography career towards advocacy. That’s why I documented nearly every day of the 2026 Sand Wash Basin roundup. On day one, as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) began its “gather operations”, Granite and his band lost their freedom.

Diana: Piceance-East Douglas

Colorado’s 2026 roundups began on August 2 in the Piceance-East Douglas Herd Management Area (HMA). I met Scott the day before to see wild horses for the first time, to witness them free. The following day, I watched them get chased into a trap.

I remember every horse I saw the day before the roundup began, particularly a grey mare with a silvery mane who stood majestically in front of my camera with the rest of her band. This photograph hangs on my wall. Whenever I look at it, I wonder whether this band is still free.

Why are wild horses being removed?

The roundups are the BLM’s response to what it says are overpopulated HMAs. Although alternatives exist, helicopter roundups return nearly every summer across the American West. The BLM maintains that horses must be removed because the range cannot support their numbers. Prior to this year’s roundup, Piceance-East Douglas held an estimated 1,145 horses, compared with an Appropriate Management Level (AML) of 135 to 235. Sand Wash Basin held an estimated 505, compared with an AML of 163 to 362. The agency cites the need to safeguard drought-strained rangelands to justify removals.

Critics point out that these same public lands are leased for commercial activities, including sheep grazing in Sand Wash Basin and cattle grazing and natural gas development in the Piceance Basin, home to the second-largest natural gas deposit in the U.S. According to wild horse advocate Suzanne Roy, livestock graze on 155 million acres of BLM land, while wild horses occupy fewer than 27 million acres. The amount of land designated for wild horses has been cut in half since 1971, when they occupied nearly 54 million acres nationwide. In Colorado, that area has shrunk from roughly 850,000 acres to about 400,000 acres over the same period. Locally, the horses don’t always have allies; wild horses can be seen as an integral part of life in the Basin, or a problem to be managed.

The narrative becomes even more complex with the native versus feral conversation. Scientists, including the late Jay Kirkpatrick, have argued that wild horses evolved in North America alongside its ecosystems, dispersed to other continents, and went extinct here before Spanish colonists brought them back. In this view, the modern horse isn’t an introduced species, as federal agencies classify them, but is a native animal returning to its original home range.

Documenting from a distance

We woke before 4 a.m. after sleeping in our vehicles at the BLM’s meeting point. Getting there takes planning. Observers must email the BLM by a set deadline to be added to the observation list, wait for approval, and confirm the night before. They receive instructions on what to wear, who they can speak to, and what equipment they can bring to document. All of this happens before they ever meet the BLM representative.

Even once they’re on the list, photojournalists face relentless challenges. The observation site can be up to two miles from the trap, with limited sightlines. Citing staff shortages, the BLM has increasingly closed viewing on certain days and capped the number of observers allowed. Once the horses leave the trap site, they are often transported to temporary holding on private land, where photojournalists can’t follow.

At Piceance, the small team of observers met the BLM representative in the dark and caravanned to the observation site, which was one mile from the trap.

The chase

The sound of the helicopter broke the silence, and soon we would see the contractors chasing a band of horses towards the trap.

What many people don’t know is that, like the sheep used to lead other sheep through the chutes toward slaughter, contractors use a trained horse to lead the wild herd into the trap. This horse is called the Judas horse.

Once the helicopter finds a band, it can chase them for over five miles towards the trap site, in temperatures reaching 90-plus degrees. Mares often lead the way while stallions drive the band from behind, sometimes ducking into trees, but the contractors persist, and it’s common to witness not only pregnant mares but also very young foals running for their lives. For many, it will be their first and last summer in the wild.

After capture

In the West Douglas Herd Area, the BLM removed every single horse, zeroing out the herd. For wild horse families, capture means more than losing their freedom. It can also mean separation from their partners and bands. They enter holding facilities, having lost the entire world they knew.

Once horses are loaded into trailers after capture, their lives take a far more complex and precarious turn–far more dangerous than drought and food scarcity in the wild. The trailers take them to short-term holding, where stallions are separated from mares and foals. Observers rarely get to witness this, although Scott has had opportunities during previous roundups to photograph captured horses in a high state of panic, realizing their freedom had been stolen.

At the trap site and in temporary holding, there is supposed to be a veterinarian, though on multiple days, there was not. This is where horses are assessed for health, injuries, pregnancies, and what the BLM considers defects. Under BLM’s euthanasia policy, those defects include severe tooth wear, deformed limbs, and permanent blindness, including in one eye. Horses may live with these conditions on the range, but they face added challenges under the stress of transport and holding.

The BLM reported nine deaths during the Piceance-East Douglas roundup, among them a yearling colt who was blind, a mare fatally injured during trailer transport, and a colt who was found dead in temporary holding. Some foals are orphaned when their mothers don’t make it into the trap. In rare cases, they are brought to nearby sanctuaries, and some survive.

The Piceance-East and West Douglas horses went to Wheatland, Wyoming, and the Sand Wash Basin horses to Rock Springs, where they are marked, vaccinated, and evaluated. From there, they may go up for adoption, or end up in long-term holding pastures, which, to a wild horse, is prison.

Under what is known as sale authority, horses can be sold to buyers who pass them on to kill buyers. A New York Times investigation found that a legal loophole lets the BLM sell wild horses cheaply to buyers who quickly resell them into slaughter, shipped to Mexico or Canada. A horse caught in this system often meets a tragic fate. Records obtained by Skydog Ranch show the BLM sold 3,724 wild horses and burros through this program in fiscal year 2025. In one case, 24 horses sold from BLM holding in Wyoming reached a Colorado kill pen within two weeks.

The cost of roundups

These roundups are paid for with taxpayer money, much of it going to the private contractors who fly the helicopters. This year, the BLM plans to remove nearly 15,000 wild horses and burros across the West, more than 1,000 of them from Colorado. They join the more than 64,000 already in off-range holding, at a cost of over $100 million a year.

Advocates promote alternatives such as fertility control and bait-trap gathers. Removing a single horse and holding them for life costs taxpayers roughly $48,000, while darting a mare with fertility control costs the BLM about $500. But the BLM says these methods take too long to affect herd size, making helicopters the most efficient way to lower populations. The question is whether the agency truly invests in alternatives. At Piceance-East Douglas, the BLM planned fertility control for 10 horses, and its reports show none were actually treated. At Sand Wash Basin, 8 of 22 planned mares were treated.

Diana: Last glimpse of freedom

After witnessing the roundup, I decided to spend my last hours in the HMA looking for more wild horses to photograph. I wanted to see them again, not being chased, not lured by the Judas horse, not running for their lives. Instead, I found myself in the wrong place at the right time. The BLM, I later learned, had forgotten to close off the main road.

A mile into the HMA, I pulled over to wait. I heard the helicopter come over the ridge behind me. Then I heard hoofbeats pounding the earth, turned, and saw an entire herd running straight toward me. The horses swerved to avoid me and my car, taking a trail up another ridge. Right behind the lead mare ran a small foal.

The helicopter left the chase and circled my car, flying low. I got back in my vehicle and kept witnessing as the crew chased the herd across private land, raising a dust storm to confuse the horses about where they would be safe. When the helicopter turned back toward me, I knew it was time to go. I had seen enough.

Scott: Advocacy for wild horses

Photojournalists rarely know what happens to the animals after they photograph them, or how far an image or video will travel. I still don’t know what happened to Granite and his band after they were rounded up at Sand Wash Basin, or whether they’ll ever be reunited. But I do know that the footage I captured, released while on assignment with We Animals and through my own PhotoAdvocacy, was viewed more than 2.5 million times. Afterward, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, five members of Congress, and 23 state legislators co-signed letters urging the BLM to pause the Colorado roundups. The BLM machine pressed on, and the Sand Wash Basin roundup went ahead as scheduled.

There is light in this darkness. Nonprofits like Skydog Ranch track horses from advocates’ photographs and work to pull them out of these facilities and bring their families back together. The documentary “Blue Zeus” follows Skydog founder Clare Staples on a nine-month-long effort to rescue a stallion from Wyoming’s Red Desert and track down his band after a roundup broke apart.

Over the next few months, the helicopters will continue rounding up wild horses in other HMAs. Photojournalists like us will stand at the observation sites and do what they can to advocate for the wild horses of the American West.

Follow Scott and Diana’s work, and learn more about how to help wild horses.