Through the lens

POLSON - Drawing on his character qualities of patience and persistence, as well as his spirit of adventure and physical might, wildlife photographer Eugene Beckes has spent countless hours exploring the Mission Mountain wilderness. He said he can sit for hours, camouflaged, in a remote place, waiting for the light and the creatures to reveal themselves to his lens.

Since moving to his St. Ignatius home, a rustic cabin that sits on 10 acres in the Mission Mountain foothills, Beckes has logged thousands of miles hiking, backpacking and climbing in the Missions. He's reached Lucifer Lake more than 380 times and summitted St. Mary's eastern peak on 27 attempts.

"I fell in love," he said of the area's natural beauty. "I've always loved the country and wildlife. I am so fortunate to live here."

Beckes made a living selling his pen and ink artwork in Missoula for 25 years. That work gradually paved the way for him to enter the world of photography, his first camera purchased with his drawings in mind. Within the first month, however, Beckes had already produced a line of colorful scenic cards of the Mission Mountains. He began selling those cards to various local businesses door-to-door.

"It's a hard way to make a living, but it enabled me to make a living," he said. "I traveled a lot with my pen and ink cards, but it's easier to sell color photography."

As a kid, Beckes said he used to climb trees to sit and watch the birds. Some of his most compelling images at the Sandpiper and Red Poppy galleries showcase the spectacular selection of Mission Valley aves. A lifelong student of the world, Beckes has learned to anticipate the flighty creatures, on occasion setting up a camera at his window, poised behind a sheet with a hole cut for the lens. Pre-setting the camera's focus on a particular section of a branch, the photographer said he then waited at the ready until the animal entered the shot to capture the action.

"There's so much luck and patience involved," Beckes said of his elusive subject-matter.

"They don't cooperate," he said. "If you really don't move, you can get birds to come pretty close to you, but even then, if you move or make the slightest mistake, they're on to you."

In a way, Beckes's current focus is a sharp contrast to his earlier years, which were characterized by restlessness and rambling.

"School and I did not agree," he said. "I couldn't stand the confinements of a classroom."

Or the confinements of a traditional nine to five. His first visit to the "Big Sky state" was in 1968 at the tail end of a trip from his home state of California to Alaska and back through Glacier National Park. He was traveling with his friend, Robert Gilbreath, who now lives in Ronan.

"We both decided that going to college wasn't very interesting, so we took a trip to Alaska in his Volkswagen bus," Beckes said. "For about six years, we worked and traveled more or less together."

The two decided to finish out the summer of ‘68 working in Glacier National Park. Later that year, in Aspen, Colo., Beckes and Gilbreath lived out of the Volkswagen again, working "grunt labor" to earn money for their next trip.

"I washed dishes and chipped ice off the deck, did a little bit of bar tending when they were really hard up for a bar tender," he said. "We did that for six weeks, slept in the bus and they fed us at work."

In six weeks they had saved enough money to finance a 3,000 mile bicycle trip, which lasted about four months.

"We were super-dependable and working 10 hours a day," he said. "They loved us and paid us pretty well because we were not skiing, we were working. It was just a matter of saving our money and living frugally."

Their journey down the coast from San Francisco led over the Coast Range and through the San Joaquin Valley., then headed east toward Las Vegas.

"We just rode over to a freight yard and hopped a train from Barstow to Las Vegas," he said. "There we were, on a flatbed with our bikes, winding up through the mountains at night... It was beautiful. We didn't have a real hard and fast goal, we just wanted to bicycle."

Originally intending to ride all the way to the east coast, Beckes said that after spending so much time in Colorado, by the time they reached Kansas, the long, flat landscape was actually rather boring. With the mountains at their backs, the intrepid explorers skipped most of the Midwest by hopping freights in Dodge City. They made it to Chicago, and eventually all the way back to Cut Bank, Mont.

"If you bicycle, it's amazing how inexpensively you can live," he said. "Really all you need is food. Every day you wake up in a new place. Every day was wonderful. I always wished they could have gone on longer."

A second epic journey began in 1971 from San Francisco to Albuquerque, New Mexico, then to Jasper, British Columbia.

"When I was young, I was just restless," Beckes said. "I had a lot of great adventures, it was fun."

Eugene Beckes's elegant wildlife photography is on display in Ronan at the Red Poppy and in Polson as part oh the Sandpiper Gallery's current show, "Through the Lens and by the Hands."