Music Come on Ruby.
(whip cracking) Music
Whoa, whoa.
Music So we're here at the Black Rock Ranger Station
on the Bridger-Teton National Forest in northwest Wyoming in the shadow of the tetons to show
you a little bit about our premiere stock program.
So here at Black rock we get wild mustangs from that have been rounded up off of the
BLM for free.
And we pick them up as weanlings or yearlings and train them.
Every time I get these horses they start to impress me more and more.
And by the time they are about four years old then they are ready to go out on the trail
and go to work on the national forest.
This district has fourty head of horses and mules and the use of stock is integral to
the managment of this ranger district.
We manage the Teton Wilderness area.
Almost six hundred thousand acres of wilderness.
A very wet wilderness.A lot of river and creek crossings.
And there's no more remote place in the lower fourty eight.
It's really the most efficient way to get across a lot of our backcountry areas.
To pack in supplies for our wilderness rangers.
We use them to actually do trail work.
Without the stock we couldn't get the work done.
They support us tremendously.
They bring in all of our tools, they bring in our food, and you know, we've got a six
to eight person trail crew and we're going in and doing hard physical labor for eight
days at a time.
And then the tools alone, we're packing, just for a three person crew trail crew, we're
building a bridge this week, we've got over two hundred pounds of tools.You know, just
one tool alone, the rock bar is about twenty five pounds.Today we're going in fifteen miles.
So imagine carrying a rock bar.
That's just one tool out of all the tools that we have.
So it's protecting the resource by using the animals to build a trail that can support
the amount of use that these trails get with the stock.
Because our main user here in the Teton Wilderness is stock users.
And without the stock program, you can't build a trail that can withstand the stock use.
The stock program here at Black Rock is vital to the program here.
Without it we couldn't do any of the work that we're doing here in my opinion.
The trail structures that we're building, the public contacts that we're doing, the
educating, and it's just impossible without the stock, they do, they do everything for
us.
Horses are used all over the national forest system atleast in the west.
So one of the really cool things about what we do here at Black Rock is we get weanlings
and yearlings, wild mustangs that have been rounded up off of the BLM that would otherwise
spend their lives sitting in a pen, and we train them to do work on those same public
lands that they came from.
And another thing that we do here at Black Rock is train our employees to be able to
safely use these animals.
And these stock animals are extremely well trained, they can do a lot of maneuvers, and
it looks pretty fancy in an arena, but the reality is that what helps them, the rider
and the animal stay safe and be more efficient at the work that they do.
My name is Jack Hatch.
I'm the stock manager for the Black Rock Ranger Station.
Every time I get these horses, they start to impress me more and more, you know.
I've never seen one of these horses not work.
We've never had one not be successful.
A lot of these mustangs are pretty handy if you give them a chance.
They're whatever you make out of them.
You teach them things and you train them and then they turn out good.
If you ignore them they don't turn out good.
You've got to be always improving them or training or teaching them things.
And that's what makes these horses be successful.
And that's, yeah, it works, it's all through respect.
They want to be good and they want to learn stuff and they want to work.
But you've got to push the right buttons and you've got to ride them correctly.
If they do something I like, I'll reach down and pet them.
And they know when they get pet or if I talk to them that they've done good.
Atta boy.
Whoa.
I talk to them a lot.
I'll say atta boy, good, good, I'll let him know.
I'll communicate with him.
Like a lot of times if I want to work him, I might go nose, nose, shoulder, shoulder,
whoa, whoa, hip, hip, hip, nose, shoulder, shoulder, hip, hip, hip, that a boy, that
a boy.
It has to be preparing the horses properly, getting full, complete body control of the
horse and then preparing the human to be able to take any horse and put a handle on them.
Because any horse, a lot of these handles can be put on pretty quickly.
And they're easier to put on if there's no baggage on them.
And I find if you get young mustangs and poor the feed to them their growth potential, they
get like this horse here, sixteen hands, four year old mustang.
And then we can spend more time with them at a younger age.
These horses have better feet, better bone.
Most of these mustangs are wearing twos and threes.
So they're pretty big footed.
They've got a lot of foot under them, have a lot of bone.
Their bone density is better than a domestic horse, their hoof density is better than a
domestic horse.
And all the horses that we keep here just get gentle, they just gentle up.
They're preferred now on this district.
People want to ride mustangs.
They don't want to ride domestic horses in the back country.
They actually turned out to be better in the long run than domestic horses.
You can ride them every day and they'll hold up to it.
And most of my domestic horses can't take that.
So in order to run a successful stock program and really take these animals from weanlings
and yearlings, into safe, reliable animals out in the field, it takes really skilled
horsemen like we have in Jack Hatch, Chris and all the others.
For there's few people around that really have the skills that Jack has.
And it takes people like district rangers and forest supervisors who believe in the
program and understand the importance of using these animals to get work done out on the
national forest.
So what we gain in efficiencies in terms of the amount of work we can get done and the
amount of country we can cover is worth every bit of the investment that we put into these
horses.
Because we can provide the well trained stock that we need to use to do the job, we can
also provide the training for employees so that they understand how to use these animals
safely to get their work done.
So this program really is integral to how we accomplish our work here on the Bridger-Teton
National Forest.
They remain the most efficient tool to get us into the back country and my hope is that
this continues into the future.
Music