Saddle up! Roaming the range once more

BY Ken Cable

It was summer, a long time ago. The early morning sun had just lit up the peak at Mammoth Mountain, a popular ski and vacation resort in California’s Eastern High Sierra north of Bishop. We were all aboard our trail-wise horses; our pack mules were loaded and we were ready to take to the trail into Sierra backcountry on a week-long fishing trip to the lakes and streams of this beautiful part of the world. Bob, a novice rider, was struggling to control a mount that was chomping at the bit and quickstepping in place in the cool morning air.

“You gotta show him who’s boss,” offered Al, a member of the party and an accomplished horseman. “He already knows who’s boss,” replied Bob.
It was mid-summer and the snow had virtually disappeared from the high passes, and pack stations all up and down the Sierra were open for business. There were 10 in our party and we were packing into the backcountry out of Red’s Meadows Station.

Our trail boss was a young woman named Dawn. Her two wranglers were another young woman named Annie and a male student (name escapes me) on summer break from school in Southern California. Off we went that chilly morning on a two-day ride to the Thousand Lakes region well into the high country. We were going fishing.

The peaks of California’s Eastern High Sierra look tantalizingly close through the windows of your car as you travel up or down Highway 395. If you’ve never been up among them you might think, as I did the first time I saw them from the highway, that a stroll to the summit might only take two or three hours maximum. Oh my, would you be wrong! I discovered this the first time I backpacked over Humphrey’s pass out of Bishop.

I relearned that lesson on subsequent hiking trips over Mono Pass into Pioneer Basin and over Trail Crest on the Mount Whitney trail. This time I would ride.
This was a full-service expedition, with a cook (the trail boss) and our two wranglers.

All we had to do was mount up when instructed, dismount when called upon to do so and make camp at the end of the day. Of course, we did all that but we also fetched firewood from the forest, water from a stream and stayed well clear of the back end of the pack mules whose temperament was uncertain.

Trail weary does not just apply to driven herds of cattle, sheep or horses. It also does not apply to a saddle sore tenderfoot bumping up a mountain on the way to the first camp. And the tenderness isn’t confined only to the feet – or to the tenderfoot.
Most of us had been on and around horses all of our lives.

Even so, a gluteus maximus that hasn’t sat in a saddle for a while will protest that first return to the leather seat after a period of time off. The effect on newcomers to the saddle is even more intense and, after a day on the trail, the return of that muscle mass to its normal configuration can be a painful prediction of what lies ahead the next day.
That afternoon we reached our first trail camp. That is all of us reached it except Jim, who riding a saddle mule, had lagged well behind.

Our camp lay off the trail, perhaps a 100 yards to the right. Jim and his mount slogged on past the cut-off. It was a while until we noticed he wasn’t in the troupe. One of the wranglers rode off in hot pursuit and soon brought him back to camp.

After dinner, we gathered around a campfire. Someone had brought a tape deck and we listened to the Sons of the Pioneers and other trail favorites while fortifying ourselves against the possibility of snakebite. Sufficiently protected, we trudged off to our tents; the fire died and the camp grew quiet.
About 2 a.m. the furious clanging of a soup ladle on a tin pot and the shouting of our leader brought us all out of our sleep and tents.

A bear had dared to amble into Dawn’s forest kitchen. Severely startled by the din, as we all were, it ran to the edge of the camp and 40 feet up a large pine where it clung until the camp settled down. Somewhere in the early hours it descended its perch and disappeared in the darkness.
Our train consisted of 19 horses and mules, 10 riders and nine pack animals.

A word about our wranglers: We’d heard that Annie was known up and down the Sierra as a savvy hand who could handle any animal in spite of its temperament, which was often bad. For example, one mule threw a back shoe. Our young male wrangler was attempting to remedy that. We would-be muleskinners stood around verbally lending our considerable ignorance to his effort – all of which he politely ignored. But the Jenny wasn’t cooperating and threatened to kick our young stockman back to Red’s Meadows.

Annie stood back and watched for a while and then took charge. She placed a loop around the animal’s neck, flicked the rope so that it circled the mule’s rump, flipped it under its belly and then maneuvered it around its back legs. She then took up the slack and, seemingly with little effort, yanked the rope and the mule fell over on its side. Beckoning her partner to sit on the mule’s head, she deftly tied its back legs and replaced the shoe. All of this was done in the space of five or six minutes.

Those of us with horse experience now knew we were in the presence of a master. What we didn’t know was that our lady wrangler would, in the year after our trek, become even more celebrated among her peers.

Annie’s wrangler outfit was simple; she wore a Marine Corps sweatshirt and fatigue pants draped over a five-foot frame, bottomed off with low-heel stockman’s boots. Her hat was a beat down flat-crowned Stetson that bore the imprimatur of countless mountain storms and long exposure to the sun.

We never saw a coat or jacket. Annie wasted few words on humans, saving her commanding discourse for her four-legged charges. It is rare for horses on a picket line to lie down. Mules do it all the time. One morning at dawn, Annie hollered, “up, up,” and we were all on our feet before the mules were.
Sierra trails are well-trodden these days, with more people taking to the backcountry on foot, horseback and sometimes mountain bikes.

In spite of that, this pristine wilderness retains is wild, challenging beauty. The rule in the backcountry is you pack out what you pack in. Diligent adherence to the rule by the packers and enforcement by forest rangers keep it that way
Days in the saddle and hours on the streams and lakes consumed our week too quickly and soon it was time to go.

We had ridden little-known trails, fished unnamed lakes, ate well, sang around campfires until the embers died and slept under stars almost too bright to watch.

We followed the high trail back to Red’s Meadows; it was long, hot and dusty. Cliff, one of our new riders, did say when he arrived at the station and dismounted, “I don’t know whether to kiss this horse – or kill it.” He gave it the remains of an energy bar before he limped away.

A year after our Red’s Meadows trip some of us returned to the Sierras out of McGee Creek pack station and learned that the packer community was abuzz about Annie. It was the end of the last season and she was leading a train of tethered mules packing equipment out of one of the high camps.

Leaving the trail, she set out on a shortcut across a steep shale slope above a lake.
Out on the shale, a mule slipped, fell and dragged the rest of the train into the lake.

Without hesitation, Annie drew her knife and dove into the cold water and began cutting the drowning mules loose. In the end, she saved most of her train but did lose three mules and much of her cargo. No one doubts that Annie still grieves the loss of her animals.

Though criticized for leaving the trail for a shortcut across the slope, she was roundly applauded for risking her life to save her charges.

I don’t know where Annie is now, but I do know that she is still the subject of campfire stories up and down the High Sierra. We never did find out if she’d ever been a Marine.

Note: Will the gentleman who called me about his sailing adventures please call again?