I first went to Montana in high school as a member of a Student Conservation Association trail crew working for 6 weeks in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, rebuilding a trail called Hahn. We hiked the dozen-plus miles over the pass to what would be our base camp, and our gear was packed-in on mules by a lean, ropey guy with a big hat and a big belt buckle. We called him Cowboy Bob.
We met Cowboy Bob at the Monture Creek trailhead, where we piled our food and gear into a heap for him to sort and wrap in canvas tarps called “manties.” He then loaded the manty packs on the sides of his mules.
I was a small town New Hampshire kid, leafy green; I’d never even heard of mule packing, let alone witnessed it. Nor had I known that cowboys still existed—I’d been more the Steinbeck sort than the Louis Lamour sort.
Our group of six high school kids and two crew leaders hiked our way into the mountains—my first taste of the Rockies—and at some point along the trail, we had to step off to let Cowboy Bob and his loaded pack string pass us. By the time we reached the base of the avalanche chute that we’d camp in for the next 6 weeks, Cowboy Bob had unpacked our gear and was readying to circle back to the trailhead.
Several more times through that summer, I saw these strings of pack mules go by, led by packers on horses. At first, a touch of disdain was mixed in with my awe—why ride and pack your gear on a mule when you could shoulder a backpack and walk on your own?
A valid enough question, I suppose, but one that drifted away as I became more intrigued by the art and culture therein—the canvas tarps, the ropes and knots, the leather saddles with double-bit axes hanging in scabbards, the smell of the horses, the campfires and cast iron and mountain way of life, cliché as that may sound—all of it got to me, and when a packer and mule train would pass on the trail, I’d stare and take-in as much as possible, gazing down the trail as the last mule—called the popper—rounded the bend.
I finished that summer, loving every minute of it—the cold, clear water creeks, the forever pile of mountains, the huge timber, the dry forest smells, the dust and icy mornings and cobblestone river banks. In late August, I returned to high school, highly changed, and the following year I went to my first year of college at the University of New Hampshire. I made zero friends and didn’t fit in whatsoever despite having been raised an hour north of the campus but in a different world entire.
I still had Montana and its mountains and mules on my mind... So, I transferred to the University of Montana, where I was accepted into a forestry program called Wilderness and Civilization.
The program was a year long interdisciplinary study of wild lands: how they affect us and we them. It was a group of 24 students, and all of our classes—ranging from economics to literature—would be together for that one year, at the end of which we’d have earned a Minor from the Forestry Department. It was a small, tight-knit group, and designed to be so. We began the year with a 10 day backpacking trip in the Scapegoat Wilderness, and punctuated the year with myriad overnights. Then we ended it with a 10 day canoe trip on the Missouri River. Needless to say, it beat the shit out of the University of New Hampshire.
We had an opening in our schedule for an elective class, and I found a night class taught off-campus by a locally famous mule packer named Smoke Elser. He'd written a book or two, and often gave lectures on campus. This class was on packing mules, and he taught it in his barn. Other than a friend and me, the other students were not affiliated with the university; just a few locals who wanted to get a bit of the equine smell on their hands.
I didn’t learn much; maybe a few knots, the general idea of how to manty a pack, saddle a mule, that stuff. But what I really learned was that I absolutely loved doing so, and needed to do more, learn more; this was, in fact, the first time in my life that I’d had that feeling: I’d found something that I had to become proficient at. This would happen again with working aboard a lobster boat, then again with digging clams, and so too with ocean sailing.
I became a bit obsessed. I hounded old Smoke Elser for a summer job in the Bob Marshall; he was one of the bigger outfitters in Montana, known for his summer and fall wilderness trips. I called him, knocked on his door, even wrote him letters. This was 1997. I didn’t want to go back to New Hampshire at the end of the year. I wanted to pack mules, sleep in the mountains, drink from the creeks. New Hampshire felt small, provincial, claustrophobic. I felt like I'd discovered a great secret. And, judging by the recent population explosion in Montana, I had.
Smoke didn’t hire me. He called one day and told me that his old crew was all returning, and he wished me good luck.
The semester had ended, and so, forlorn, I moved out of the house I was renting, but I didn’t begin my drive back to NH. All of my stuff was in the back of my little VW Rabbit pickup truck. I slept on the side of a mountain just north of town near a trailhead in the Rattlesnake that, these days, is far too busy to do such a thing. But back then, it was a wild place, and I loved it.
One day, one of my old roommates told me I’d gotten a phone call from a guy named Jack Rich, from a ranch called the Rich Ranch. He’d left a phone number. I called him back, and he said that Smoke Elser had given him my name and number.
Jack ran a ranch and outfit--the Rich Ranch and Double Arrow Outfitters--similar to Smoke’s, but his was based an hour north, in Seeley Lake. He also ran a youth horsemanship camp in the summers, and he needed a councilor.
The whole thing didn’t sound great to me. Jack wasn’t the famous Smoke, and I wasn’t inclined to be a camp councilor; I’d only been on a horse once, a decade previous, so while it’d never occurred to me that I maybe wouldn’t be able to lead a string of mules horseback, it did occur to me that I probably couldn’t teach kids how to ride.
Nevertheless, desperate, I agreed to drive up and meet the Rich family.
But I wasn’t a total dummy; I called Smoke to ask about this Jack Rich character. Smoke vouched for him, said Jack and his father had been packing and guiding forever, and that they were one of the very best outfits in the state.
I was still skeptical. I didn’t know shit about it, but in my mind, it was Smoke’s outfit or nothing.
So I slept on my hillside in Sawmill Gulch, and the following morning, I packed my sleeping bag and drove up the Blackfoot River to meet Jack and Belinda Rich. I had some dirty old t-shirt on, a pair of ratty river sandals, and some Carhartts that were so torn that the crotch was ripped out. And I’d forgotten to wear underwear.
No matter. I didn’t want the job anyway.
I parked my VW truck next to their big trucks. I had a sticker that said something about saving the grizzly bears, even though I’d never seen one. Jack had grown up in the mountains. He’d seen a few, but I didn't notice the irony then.
They interviewed me on the deck of their recently built lodge. With my crotch-ripped pants, I kept my legs tightly crossed. Below us, the barn sat at the edge of a sprawling meadow which was shouldered by hills followed by the big peaks of the Bob Marshall; nearly 100 head of horses and mules grazed in the meadow. The place was amazing.
We chatted. Jack was a big dude, half mountain man, half cowboy, smart and eloquent. Six-four, barrel chested. Belinda sat next to him, a bit quieter, savvy and kind and perhaps skeptical of the crotch-torn hippy in front of her. They asked about my trail work experience, this and that; I don’t really remember. I asked if I’d learn to pack mules. They said that we would do an overnight pack trip each week with the kids, and if all went well this summer, I’d graduate into being a full time packer sometime down the road.
I didn’t like the sounds of “down the road,” but I agreed. I remember Jack shaking my hand, saying, “Looks like we’ll be working together this summer, bud.”
So I got lucky. Lucky that Smoke hadn’t hired me, lucky that Jack and Belinda had. Lucky, I say, because Jack Rich was a rare individual, and certainly not a smoke show. Raised in those mountains by a very special mother and father, he knew the mountains and mountain horses in a way I'd never fathomed. On top of that, he was, and is, a brilliant dude and a gifted teacher. As was the family and crew that orbited him. I can’t imagine fitting-in with another outfitter like I eventually did with them.
Eventually.
It took a while.
Of course, I was an outlier, an east coast hippy kid who was essentially hired because they couldn’t find anyone else and the clock was ticking. Jack still likes to remind me of this fact from time to time, and neither of us will ever know if Smoke was playing a trick on Jack by recommending me or not, but at one point, years later, when I swung into my saddle at the trailhead, and Jack went to hand me the lead rope for the string of 8 mules that we’d be packing into our hunting camp, he’d paused, the rope still in his hand, then patted my knee which was covered in thick leather chaps, and he’d said, “You’re the last one I thought I’d be handing my camp string to. You did good, bud.”
What Smoke had told Jack was that I was eager, and that I wanted to work. Jack, being in a tight spot, reasoned that he could teach me everything else, and I could maybe, hopefully, get him through the summer.
What Jack didn’t know was that, despite my hippy-ass appearance and manner, and my ho-hum indecision, when I decided to do something, I would cling like a fucking barnacle. Hell, I didn’t know that either, back when I was 19 years old. That was my first time. But I clung onto the Rich family.
The Rich Ranch was and is a family affair, with 3 generations present at that point. Jack’s mother, Helen, was the matriarch (his father, C.B., had passed the previous year), and the sister, Peggy, and her husband, Ralph, were co-operators. Other sisters worked there as well, a bit more peripherally.
C.B. and Helen had both grown up in the remote ranch country of the Stillwater Valley, due north of Yellowstone. C.B. was a cowboy, elk guide, and trapper; he put himself through college by trapping and selling furs. Helen was a trained nurse.
As a navigator on a bomber in WWII, C.B. was shot down over enemy occupied France. He landed in a swamp, blinded by the explosion, where he hid-out for days as German soldiers searched with their dogs. Only one other member of the crew survived, and he was taken prisoner.
C.B. linked-up with the French resistance and posed as a mute butcher for nearly a year before France was liberated. Helen believed him to be dead.
Returning home, they moved north, bought the Double Arrow Ranch, and began outfitting in the Bob Marshall.
For a sort of odd essay about them, click here:
Peggy and Ralph’s son, Little Ralph, taught me to ride; he was 9 years old. Through the spring, we did ranch work—fencing and oiling saddles and working on trails, and then in the evenings, we’d ride the trails and meadows surrounding the ranch.
I slept on a cot in a canvas wall tent, and ate my meals with them in the lodge, and I earned 30 or 35 dollars a day, I can’t remember, but years blinked away, and I went back, year after year. I worked my way out of the youth camp, became a wrangler, a mule packer, and once I graduated college, a full time guide. I learned to ride, to saddle mules and manty packs and run high-lines and ford rivers and set backcountry camps and wrangle horses and mules and deal with grizzly bears, to guide for and hunt elk, to quarter those elk and pack them out of crazy places, high in the mountains, often in black-dark, on the backs of mules. And much, much more. All of this despite my flip-flops and my general lack of the cowboy romanticism that fuels so many others. Hell, I didn’t even know who John Wayne was. Nor did I care.
Me, I carried a pocket copy of Walden in my saddle bags.
Thanks for reading...to be continued...go ahead and share this stuff if you like it. Yeehaw.
I am so grateful I got to work with you during those years and am blessed to call you a close friend! Miss you and our talks more than you know - Jamie
Awesome one, Keller