I’m in Elko again this week, for the 39th The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and to spend time with one of my favorite people, Rachel Toler .
I met Rachel during the summer of 2019. We didn’t get to chat all that much because we were busy moving cattle through thick timber back to where they were supposed to be.
Fast forward a year, while most of the world was weird the mountains were no different than they’d always been and Donny Carr said “Why don’t you join Rachel and me on our pack trip. No need to bring a tent, I’ll pack one for you ladies.
Great, I thought. What could possibly go wrong. Stuck in a tent with a stranger and her beady eyed heeler on a mountain during monsoon season when you’re going to be spending extra time in there to wait out the afternoon rains.
What I didn’t know is that when an outfitter tells you he’s bringing a tent, it’s so big that you can hardly find the other person, and he’s bringing camp cots too.
So we set up our cots on opposite sides of the tent, somehow fit our dogs (a German Shepherd takes up a lot more room than a heeler) into our respective cots too, and went to sleep.
That lasted until about 3am when all hell broke loose on the highline. It was DG Littlefoot’s (who’s unfortunately no longer with us) first pack trip after Blanca had gone into semi retirement, making Lacy my main ride and him the pack horse.
Littlefoot was the only horse I’ve met to date who was gentle and hobble trained but got claustrophobic when he woke up with them on, unable to freely move his front legs. Only I didn’t know that yet.
He had panicked and gone down, weirding out the other horses on the highline with him. Not quite knowing what the problem was yet, we got the highline loose, him up, and everything put back together only for the same thing to happen again just after we’d returned to our sleeping bags.
No trees or Mustangs were hurt in the process and he spent the rest of the night tied to a tree without hobbles. Going forward he’d wear a single cuff hobble at night on the foot he liked to paw with and he never had an issue again. Not letting horses dig craters or eat and otherwise damage trees is a big part of our responsibility to minimize our impact and that of our stock on the backcountry we love.
We put some good miles in on that trip, talked about everything you can imagine, did camp chores in our pajamas and had a whole lot of fun.
Fast forward 3 1/2 years and we’ve both driven across several state lines to ride, dance, talk and spend time together at least once a year.
So much so that yesterday when we wanted to do some cutting practice and didn’t have a flag or live cattle, we took turns being each other’s cow.
My packing friends are some of my favorite people because you have to be a certain kind of strange to enjoy that kind of thing, and this lady, her big, quirky red gelding and little hedgehog dog Dax have a special place in my heart.
Wild Horse Outreach & Advocacy
