Horses and Packers

Grab your bear can or camp chair, kick your feet up and chew the fat about anything Sierra Nevada related that doesn't quite fit in any of the other forums. Within reason, (and the HST rules and guidelines) this is also an anything goes forum. Tell stories, discuss wilderness issues, music, or whatever else the High Sierra stirs up in your mind.
sierramel
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Location: Crowley Lake/Mammoth Lakes, Ca. since '81

Re: Horses and Packers

Post by sierramel »

Well, I might as well throw in my 2 cents.
Having switched over from carrying a gigantimous pack (and the resulting ruined back) about 14 years ago, to using llamas instead to carry my gear, and then also living a couple of miles from several major trail heads in the sierras, I have a rather unique perspective.
First, the llamas, as most folks know, leave next to no trace. They hike barefoot, generally weigh less than 400 pounds, browse rather than graze, and leave pellets as opposed to piles of stinking horse-hit covered with flies. This, in addition to the fact that they are proven smarter than your average usual **** horse, which when it sees a llama on the trail tends to spook like it has seen a flying saucer and run off with its eyes rolling in its head, trampling everything and everyone in its path. God.. I could tell you a zillion stories about my encounters between me and my llamas and horses on the trail.
Most pack pack outfits, at least in my area, generally have lead riders who are pretty congenial on the trail, particularly if hikers (and those with them with "those damn llamas") follow trail etiquitte (did I misspell that?): get down off the trail, don't try to pass them from behind or squeeze past them, and don't make any fast, unexpected moves (so the livestock doesn't go apeshit).
Now when I get a possible clue of any pack train (noise, whistles, cowbells, hoof noise over rocks- ahead or behind me-, downwind stink) anywhere NEAR my vicinity, I have to run and get off the trail and hide me and the llama (s) in the brush, out of sight, and not MOVE, so the horses don't know we're there. The horses figure out there is a llama in the neighborhood, and we have a trainwreck.
Not many horse outfits have bothered to integrate one of those ecologically correct llamas into their stock corrals, so nine times out of ten there is always a potential rodeo on the trail. I can tell you I get pretty tired of playing leapfrog on the trail with a pack train.
I think the worst mess of a trail, and the least cooperative outfit I can describe - at least lately - is the one out of Rock Creek, the Mono Pass trail. Oh, a few of the trail leads are pretty nice, but the trail itself is destroyed from the amount of horse traffic. This past summer I was dodging pack strings of 20 or more loaded down horses, several times a day. Up and down the trail. At night, even though its against regulations, they were even loose-herding their animals (unsupervised I might add) down the trail (something the Pine Creek Pack Station used to do until they got busted and fined several years ago for the depredations they were indulging in in French Canyon). I was having 20 or more loose horses and mules at a time, following a belled horse, stampeeding through my campsite at dusk with no cowboys anywhere in sight. Needless to say, me and the llama were a little concerned.
The Rock Creek Pack Station had a semi-permanent horse camp set up at the Third Recess junction, and what a mess they had made of the area. Packers coming and going with groups of tourists on horseback, trampled vegetation, bare dirt, and FLIES!
Sorry for the rant - anyway, the Mono Pass Trail closer to the top on the east side of the pass, and particularly on the west side of the pass, is the most knee-twisting, ankle-busting, toe-jamming piece of horse-churned rock I have ever been over that wasn't cross country.
The aromatic piles of old and new horse "excretia" were impressive, the biting black flies were a plague. In the heat of the summer the trail itself was a mix of pulverized powdered horse manure and a little dirt. Really disgusting and doubtful healthy to breathe.
One year I was up on the bench above French Canyon, out of Pine Creek, where Puppet, L, Moon, Star (etc.) lakes are located. The Pine Creek Pack Station had a week-long campsite set up there for a group of tourists next to the inlet of Moon Lake. There were horse-turds floating down the stream and into the lake. The small wet meadows along the trail were a mass of manure and deep hoofprints. This kind of damage tends to last for years.
Well, at least know you know why I object to most horse traffic in the backcountry. At least in some places the Forest Service is using llamas for trail work. I guess the F S isn't all bad.
"Some places remain unknown because no one has ventured forth. Others remain so because no one has ever come back."
quentinc
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Re: Horses and Packers

Post by quentinc »

Personally, and I'm sure I'm in the minority, I appreciate the rant. :)

My favorite story (in retrospect) about the Mono Pass trail is when, about halfway up, I realized there was a pack train approaching from the rear, and another heading towards me from above. I had visions of being smashed to death, like when the walls of a room hurdle in towards each other in cartoons. Fortunately, not being burdened with a llama, I was able to cut a switchback and get around the top pack train. How they got around each other, I will never know. Since I haven't been back to that trail since, it's possible the two trains are still there, facing off into eternity.

I don't know much about llamas, but unlike mules, they sure are fun to see in the backcountry!
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