…and a hell of an adventure. We spent 4 days packing in, camping, riding, and packing out of the Great Bear Wilderness (part of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex), which is the vast wild area south of Glacier National Park. Notes of interest:
- It is very difficult to take photographs from the back of a moving horse.
- 15 miles in the saddle at one time can make the butt sore, along with utilizing various muscle groups in ways they don’t normally get.
- Advil and Vanquish really help with butt soreness.
- For reasons I don’t quite understand, heart-attack food and wilderness go together. (We ate breakfasts that consisted of french toast and half a pig’s worth of bacon, or biscuits and gravy, or pancakes and sausage…).
- Draft mules can carry simply amazing amounts of stuff. Not only that, I watched with admiration as each mule carefully maneuvered its high’n'wide panniers or packboxes to miss all the trees crowding the trail.
- A good saddle horse is worth a lot when you’re back in the wilderness.
- Horses and mules get awfully fresh after 2 days of lazing about on a high-line with occasional turns loose in the meadows and forest. (Pack string rodeo is disconcerting, to say the least).
Our hosts were Jay & Kim Diest; Jay has spent half a lifetime packing for the Forest Service in northwestern Montana and living in the wilderness while so doing. His vast experience with stock, campcraft, knots, dogsledding, hunting, and packing is humbling, and he probably represents a dying breed. Jay had stories galore and we clamored for more.
A study in contrasts and irony: this is a wilderness airstrip which Paul (my husband, and the guy on the red roan) had flown us into when we owned a bush plane.
You better have good steady stock when you’re riding a scree slope like this one.
I’m still sorting through the 1100+ photos that I took, and feeling a bit let down to be back in civilization. Though that first hot shower after being in the back of beyond is always damn nice…
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