I started in 1977, still going at it somewhere around what 43 years or something like that now.
It was going to be a three-month job packing stuff to the lookout so be careful what job
you take for the summer ‘cause I’m still here.
Horsemanship and packing is part of our agency’s identity, part of our culture.
And it's a safe and practical tool that should be continued to use into the future.
We’re all really proud of the tradition. And I think it's great. And I think it’s
a really cool history, but that's not why we're here. We're here because it works.
I started out and I'm still working in what's called the Yolla Bolly Wilderness.
It was set aside as a Primitive Area way before the ’64 Wilderness Act.
The Wilderness Act decreed certain areas of public land would be preserved and protected
with minimal human impact.
The Wilderness Act prohibits mechanized transportation. It's not just non-motorized. It's not mechanical.
So, no bicycles, technically no wheelbarrows.
The only way that they can get that equipment, the tools to do the job that we've asked them to do
or hired them to do, is by putting it on mules and carrying it into the backcountry.
The Alps is huge, it’s 500,000 acres and it's round. And so to get to the middle with
a load of stuff could be days of hiking.
It's either carry it or drag it, is the two ways, and we're not dragging it and it's too
heavy for me to carry, so we put it on these mules.
Packing provides the material support for the various crews and individuals working
in wilderness or other roadless areas.
Packing involves the support of a crew that we designated to do a specific job in the
mountains, in the wilderness. They could be back five miles. They could be back 15 miles.
What we call a string is a group of mules and it's how we tie them together.
The mules learn to work in a unit. A string can be two mules to twenty, even fifty mules.
Most mules carry 150 to 175 pounds. And so it's quite a campaign when you do it,
but the productivity of what goes on in the backcountry is at a much higher level.
Despite growing demands, the shrinking budgets put the pack stock program at risk.
We were just about gone and we had a meeting with all the stock people in the region.
And I think there was seventeen of us that had anything to do with stock in the whole region.
The next year, there was about nine. It was going downhill that fast.
A lot of the people in the past that knew what pack stock was all about were retiring.
Michael and I started talking about this need to become a viable part of the Forest Service
and to maintain the stock programs.
We were at a point in our history that I felt that if we didn't do something new, that we
became more of a tool that could be utilized for all kinds of different things, we were
going to be extinct in no time. So then we came up with the idea of The Center of Excellence.
The Region 5 Pack Stock Center of Excellence is an innovative program that honors Forest Service
tradition while addressing current and future needs.
The reason why we are called the Center of Excellence is not that we are going forth
and being excellent every day. It's that we are always trying to be better and we're
always trying to provide the best and most excellent program that the region can have in support
of all the activities that the Forest Service does.
A big part of the District Packer’s job here, and always has been, was basically to
cut logs out and keep trails open. You can’t get access for any of the surveys that the
scientists do, fires, it all kind of hangs on that access.
The largest thing we support is trails, but we’ve worked with almost every specialty
in the Forest Service.
Currently in the Center, we’re available for anybody and everybody in the Region.
We support a lot of monitoring, ecosystem work, rehab projects, fisheries, fires, archaeology,
hydrology, botany, law enforcement, you name it.
Everybody you pack needs camp gear, so that's kind of the universal, tents and kitchens.
Their tools, their groceries.
Meat in coolers, 12 dozen eggs, a whole box of apples, a whole box of oranges.
Fire crews have their whole own rigamarole that goes with them,
mostly heavy tools and awkward stuff.
Picks and shovels, rock bars.
Heavy metal, pumps, hose, pipe.
Fuel, gasoline, propane cylinders, racks that are designated to haul water.
There's never enough water and Gatorade on a fire. The science crews, they have different equipment.
Radio repeaters, solar panels, 14-foot timbers, planking and bridge material.
Metal roofing, windows. It’s a surprise every day.
What makes this job interesting to me is it’s a new day every day.
Two years ago we packed cutthroat trout out of the back of a mountain.
Sometimes it's not a thing you took in there, and it has to come out.
So we cut the trail open and then take the trash out with us.
I don't think people realize how much we actually use pack stock, not only in this region,
but across the nation.
We're not just Region 5. We do a lot of activity elsewhere. We help nonprofit organizations.
We’ve always supported the California Conservation Corps. We've supported the Backcountry Horsemen.
We help CDF, BLM. We work with Fish and Wildlife Services. And we’ve developed our horsemanship
safety classes that takes it from the anatomy of the animal all the way to how to put a
saddle on, because the most important thing is how to be safe around these animals.
There’s all of these people that we are supporting, but we also do a lot of community outreach.
I mean, locally here in Weaverville we do Frontier Days, we do the Fourth of July parade.
Mule Days and helping to teach young kids under the program of Want to be a Packer?
Helping schools learn things about packing in the Forest Service
A couple of times we’ve done the Rose Parade.
The Rose Parade had almost a million people watch it in person and 27 million people watch
it on TV. And that was part of the celebration of Smokey's 75th birthday.
The pack strings are a well-known, public face of the Forest Service. Probably one of
the Forest Service’s best ambassadors.
The pack stock program and the Forest Service mule is one of the best promotional public
interaction things we have. Other than Smokey the Bear. It’s hard to compete with Smokey,
but you put the mule and Smokey together, and you have a winning combination.
Increasingly, pack stock is becoming an important tool for fire management.
We rely on pack stock regularly on a yearly basis. We get lots and lots of fires in the backcountry
and more and more we're choosing to not aggressively suppress them and manage them.
So we need to set up backcountry spike camps and support those camps with firefighters
and food and provisions and supplies to effectively manage those fires.
The pack stock is a tool for the firefighters, it’s a tool in their toolbox.
If there is the benefit of time to respond to a fire and we can use pack stock in the wilderness,
it’s proven to be much more cost effective than running helicopters.
We kind of work in good conjunction with helicopters, but the hourly cost of a helicopter is higher
than our whole daily cost for a pack string.
Everybody realizes we both complement each other. That helicopter can be across the canyon
over there in fifteen minutes and have stuff delivered where it might take us all day long to get over there.
But we can go when they can't fly and we can go on missions that are way
less critical and they can be gone doing something else.
One of the things that the Center of Excellence did really well was it kind of made us all a team.
Through this process of trying to survive, we all started helping each other.
The concept of One Region, One Program of Work, I think we're ahead of the curve on that one.
Increasingly, the Forest Service is relying on partnerships and the idea of shared stewardship
to effectively care for our public lands.
There's a huge amount of trails and country out there, and there's twenty of us left in the Region.
. And we could nowhere near do it all. But we can do a lot more by packing
in those partnerships and volunteer crews.
We’ve been sending crews here to the Shasta-Trinity National Forest for over 35 years.
Basically we hire around ninety-two 18 to 26 year-olds. We place them on six different crews,
and they spend five and a half continuous months living and working in these remote wilderness locations,
focusing on trail repair, trail maintenance for public lands.
And so it's an immersive program. We lived and worked there the whole time and our resupplies
were delivered by mules every week or every two weeks throughout that whole summer.
The adjustment into that work was pretty rough. But after a few weeks, like, it really hooked me in.
And obviously here, you know, I'm sitting here nearly twenty years later
and providing that experience for for more young adults.
We help them steward the public lands. We help maintain the trails so they're safe
and more accessible for the public. And it's a great pipeline for their future employees.
A fundamental focus of the Center of Excellence is mentorship .
One of the greatest things that the Center has enabled us to do is to train
the next generation of stock people and packers.
I mean this is the best possible way but there is no one harder to work for than Lee
because he is such a, a perfectionist isn't really the right word.
He's just meticulous about every single detail. And there's a reason why every single detail happens the way it does.
And that's what makes him so good at what he does. But it's overwhelming,
especially when you start working there.
There’s the basic principles, the basic functions of doing the job and how you go about it.
But it's the nuances that make the difference between a safe and efficient organization.
And that's part of the skill set we're trying to build into the Center.
You’re learning how to tie the knots, you're learning the first aid, you're learning shoeing,
you’re learning and all the things that goes with just basic taking care of the mules.
You're also learning the country, you're learning the weather, you're learning the trail conditions.
All of those things are part of safely getting through the mountains with a string of mules.
I’ve learned a tremendous amount. The importance of mentors is you know, something that sometimes
gets overlooked. And having mentors to work with on a daily basis in such a specific trade is invaluable.
The Center of Excellence is part of the Forest Service’s history and its future.
As long as we have public lands and wild open spaces that people value, the need for that
work is never going to go away. And it's not history. It's not just romance.
It's how you get the job done, you know.
I feel like we spend the majority of our time feeling we are productively doing something
to better manage America’s public lands.
If we are to truly to care about this place for future generations, we must rely on some
of these traditional basic practices that have proven to be so effective over time.
We couldn’t do our jobs if the U.S. Forest Service packers weren’t doing their jobs.
The Center has been incredible to me and I want to continue to be a part of it.
To keep it going, it's going to need the support of the Region and the support of the agency as a whole.
And I think it provides a service that, once gone, will never come back.