I’ve worked more for Jack Rich than for any other person in my lifetime, and learned as much or more from him as from any other person in my lifetime. He taught me about horses and mules and packing, and about hunting and guiding, and about the mountains and, most importantly, a way to be within those mountains; this way was different than the backpacking trips I’d taken, the canoe trips I’d done. Call it culture; somehow, some way, I became closer to the mountains, more at home there.
It’s tempting to say it was simply the amount of time we spent in the backcountry. We ran mostly 10 day trips, summer and fall, with a couple of days out of the mountains in between; most of my time from June to October was in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, which is one of the biggest wilderness complexes in the lower 48, and for the years between college and graduate school, I was logging around 100 nights a year in my sleeping bag.
This idea of the mountain way also came about via the act of working within those mountains. The idea of work is a significant part of what enamored me to the mule packers in the first place; somehow, they seemed to belong in the hills, to fit in a manner that the trail crews I’d worked on, and the backpackers I’d hiked with, had not.
I didn’t feel as separate from the hills as I had previously; less like a visitor. Years later, I would discover a similar feeling in lobster fishing and clam digging; instead of recreating, you are taking part in the goings-on of the landscape, a process which is, at times, extractive, true, but one that places you in those environs in a context that is difficult to achieve otherwise--and at times that the casual visitor would not be there--riding high ridges at midnight after gutting an elk; watching the sun rise from a lobster boat a few miles off shore.
The majority of the equipment we used hadn’t changed in the last century. Simple things: the leather and canvas instead of gore-tex and nylon. The horseback skidding of lodgepole pine rails to build backcountry corrals, the creekside watering of horses, the sleeping on the ground atop horse blankets, drinking from the creeks and hidden springs that Jack or his father had found long ago and perhaps shoved a hollowed-out log into for a spigot; crossing high-water rivers as the strings of packed mules braced themselves against the rib-deep icy spring flows, shoveling our way over the tops of the passes in early spring… so much of this the simple breaking of the rules that had been drilled into my head as a backpacker—we’d get soaked, sore, blistered within our blue jeans and leather boots and denim jackets, but we’d keep going, keep working, and later, we’d start huge, blazing fires to dry ourselves beside.
After all, this was a fire-based landscape, and the fires we started were far off the beaten path, no different than the myriad lightening strikes and forest blaze scars we saw scattered through the hill country.
So too did the idea of toughness sink into my head. We’d begin each season earlier than the Forest Service (or anyone else, for that matter), so we’d be the first ones over the high passes each spring, the first ones into the mountains since the previous fall, when we’d been the last to leave. Through the winters, trees would fall across the trails, so our initial trips would be trail clearing, and we’d open more trail in a day than the Forest Service would in a week. It wasn’t a high-testosterone thing, not at all. It was just a group of hard working, fun, kind people pushing each other and themselves.
One of these first trips I went on would teach me a lesson that I still recall most days when I’m exhausted by whatever labor I’m at. I was with Jack’s brother-in-law, Ralph, and his son, Little Ralph, and a packer friend named Justin. It’d been a brutal winter, and the trails were buried in tree fall. No mechanized equipment is allowed in federally designated Wilderness Areas, so all of our work was with cross-cut saws and axes.
Together, we cut over 800 trees out of the trail in two days, and what I will always remember is being too exhausted to continue, but there was Ralph, stoic as a frigging cliff face, wearing his black leather vest and black Stetson, climbing back onto his horse, time after time, gathering up his lead rope, and urging his string of mules and worn out workers further down the trail. And we’d continue on. I simply hadn’t known we could do that, and to this day, the image of Ralph’s silhouette atop that horse, the mules behind him, is clear in my mind.
We joke about those early days. I was the sole hippy kid, the liberal; it took me as long to adopt the cowboy garb as it took them to accept my differences—and I took on the gear only as I began to see the logic therein. The hats kept your head dry in the rain, shaded in the sun. The boots fit the stirrups, slid both in and out with ease. The pants kept your thighs from chafing in the saddle—a lesson I learned after 15 miles of trotting that led to twin open sores the size of pancakes, one on each butt cheek.
But it was a slow process, and more than once I’d return to my cot to find a cowboy shirt or two left there for me. I was told that Jack’s new shirts had shrunk in the wash, although he was twice my size and the tags on the shirts were my size, not his. Things like that.
My first dog, a border collie named Henry, was born there on the ranch, and handed to me on a whim by Little Ralph one night. Henry spent the first half of his life following me horseback through the hills, some days covering well over 30 miles of trail, swimming those same crazy rivers, nearly dying more times than I can count.
Years later, when I told Jack that Henry had finally died, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “He was a once in a lifetime dog, bud. I had one once. Just once.” Then shook his head, smiled, and added, “There was a whole lot of times that dog should have been dead.”
Like: Being kicked in the head by a big, fast, powerful horse named Blackjack that sent him literally cartwheeling through the air, end over end.
Or, being bit on the back by a nasty mule named Spade, dragged beneath Spade’s legs, and stomped; somehow Henry went spurting out the side, having learned a brutal lesson about mules (they like to kill dogs).
Or, being swept downriver as a puppy when I had a bunch of horseback kids mid-river so I could do nothing to help so just watched Henry disappear around the flooded river bend. Ten brutal minutes later, he came running down the trail, water logged. Jack looked back at me over his string of mules and nodded once, as if to say, There’s a mountain dog.
Or, in a similar situation, when he was swept beneath a mule’s legs mid-river, and nearly stomped into the rocky bottom.
Or, when he tried to cool off in a pool at the top of a waterfall and was sucked over the edge. I wasn’t there. Ray had him, and Ray said he rode back down to the base of the falls so he could bury the body if he could find it but there was Henry, waterlogged again after a 50 foot cascade over cliffs and ledges.
Or, when we ignored an Idaho Forest Ranger's warning ("He's a candyass. He doesn't know shit," said Ray.) about the aspect of a certain trail causing the morning sun to create an uncanny oven out of the hillside; Henry nearly passed-out from heat exhaustion and I ended up carrying him down the mountainside, shocked and wobbly myself, as Ray and Ryan led the exhausted horses back down (horses can sweat so faired better than the dog).
Odd moments for probably the smartest dog I’ve ever been around, but then, he was consistently surrounded by such hazards, and worse, and lived to be over 16 years old, and in that time gained the trust of men like Jack and Ralph and even a lobsterman named Eric who once rushed to save the very old Henry from falling into the water and then said, “That’s the first time I ever helped a dog.” Which is to say, guys who’s trust was not easy for a canine to gain.
With Jack, I think it was a gradual process, but with Ralph, who is and was as old school a cowboy as I’ve ever seen (when my sister first saw him, she said: “I didn’t know people like that existed anymore.”), it ultimately came down to one moment.
We were riding across an open meadow, approaching a backcountry ranger station called Big Prairie. Ralph had a string of 8 mules. I had 3 horses packed behind me. Peggy was ahead of Ralph with perhaps a half-dozen guests. All horseback.
Open meadows can be dangerous places when you’re leading a string of horses or mules. If a problem arises, there’s nothing to stop them. They’re all tied together, pig-tailed halter to saddle, so if, say, one mule spooks and decides to run, it’ll pull all the others as well, and soon you have 8 mules going every which way, all tied together, with the lead rope being held by the packer. There’s not much the packer can do; hopefully, they can take a dally around the saddle horn and circle, make big loops to fan the mules out, keep them moving in a specific direction, a specific pattern. Otherwise, absolute dangerous bedlam.
In the woods, the trees are there to form something of a fence, a boundary.
Open hillsides, especially the steep canyons that are common in the Rockies, are the most dangerous; a problem arises there, and you have nothing to do but keep moving forward and hope to cross the hillside before the string of mules goes tumbling down.
And they do go tumbling down; I’ve seen it happen and had it happen and it is bad.
But on this occasion, heading into Big Prairie, the ground was open and flat. The ranger station has a front porch, and is surrounded by wooden jack-leg fences.
Some backpackers were on the porch, and when their dog spotted us approaching, it charged us, barking and going nuts. It shot under the fence and hit full speed, heading straight for Ralph and his mules.
The mules saw it immediately, and were beginning to shy away (despite their willingness to kill a dog when the opportunity presents itself, they don't like being charged by one or spooked by an unknown). Ralph was talking to the mules, “Easy boys, easy now…”, but the dog was coming fast.
Then suddenly there was Henry, charging from behind me, running much faster than the other dog--that border collie burst--past the mules and straight toward the oncoming dog. The dog was significantly bigger than Henry and they collided hard and the dog went sprawling as if hit by a bullet, tumbling, and Henry landed on it again then again as he chased it back to the fence line.
When everything had settled, and the mules were tied-up and we were eating lunch, I saw Ralph patting Henry and feeding him chunks of his sandwich.
The crew then was a special crew. The ranch kids were coming of age, and some of them were the same age as me, as were the other packers, Justin and Ryan, both of whom were from Ohio.
And so too was there a crazy-ass retired dairy farmer from Washington state name Ray, whom Jack would eventually team me up with (in retrospect, to keep Ray out of trouble). Ray had his own string of mules that he ran for Jack, and he and I spent years together packing summer trips into the mountains with one of Jack’s sisters, Mary Anna, with us as camp cook.
Ray and I eventually left the Rich Ranch, and spent a couple of summers doing contract packing for the Forest Service, carrying gear and tools for trail crews just like the one I’d been on, and doing trail work ourselves in the Wilderness areas that didn’t allow any power tools. We’d pack into the hills for a few days or a week at a time with cross-cut saws and axes and cut the trails open in the spring as we went.
But Ray is another story; I said earlier that Jack was one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had, and so too is Ray on that list, along with a few others. I’ve been lucky like that.
