On Using Horses for Rock Climbing

My hands instinctively submitted to an innate survival urge to pull back on the reins. The cantankerous mustang mare I was riding certainly wanted to go on, but I had never, ever been down a precipice like this on the back of a horse. An older, wiry cowboy named Rex, with his ancient cowboy father-in-law, Ed, were my trail guides, and they chatted happily and quite nonchalantly as they dropped over the edge out of sight and descended into a cliff-bounded abyss, now deeply shadowed in the low angle sun of late afternoon.

The cowpokes didn’t even bother looking back. The older one was a sort of living fossil, in his eighties. The way I saw it, they both didn’t have much to lose. They had a good life; their families had grown. I had a young family, I thought, but my now nervously pawing mare was chomping at the bit to go on and couldn’t care less. She started to hop around in frustration.

Rather than risk her losing footing on the edge, I should let her have her head and follow her equine friends. My mind went through the consequences. The sad story would emerge slowly over idle dinnertime conversation on ranches throughout the Salmon River country: another greenhorn lost in a horse accident in those rough volcanic cliffs. “Sad. He even had a family. Too bad…Pass the salt and pepper, will ya?”

We stepped over the edge.

Those wiry mustang horses were as sanguine about the country as the men were. They knew nothing else but these Salmon River Breaks; they were born here, and ran wild among the rocks until Ed and Rex “put a handle on them” when they turned 5. As we descended the 6 inch wide goat trail, some of those same rocks peeled from the edge of the trail and never stopped rattling down ledge and brush; the sound faded not because the rocks stopped rolling, but because the rolling and bouncing rocks were too far away to hear.

I held the rankish Judy back as best I could without causing her to get broncy. The cliffs and rocks yielded to sliding and unforgivingly steep gravel fields of volcanic ash dotted with bunchgrasses and bitterbrush. If we went “ass over teakettle” as they called it, there was no stopping us in the tumble that would follow until we hit the bottom of the canyon. I would be dead. Judy too. I pulled my size 15 boots out of my stirrups to my toes; if she went down, I would be ready and could cut loose…maybe there was a chance I could arrest my roll downward by hanging up in a tree, rock or bush. I had no interest in staying with Judy through the countless rolls like a rag doll tied to the wildly rolling barrel of a horse body all the way to the bottom. Ed and Rex would just ride to the bottom, use their lasso to mantie up my busted body, roll it in canvas, and lash me to a packsaddle on another horse. Then, they would walk me out just as if I was another piece of gear that they packed over these mountains, horseback in the middle of nowhere.

Judy wanted to catch up to her comrades and continued to try to trot recklessly downward. I could see Ed and Rex’s brush beaten and sweat-stained Stetsons swaying side to side below us, and was looking down on the tops of their hats. Finally they stopped, on kind of a brushed up ledge in a sort of “v” in the face of the mountain. They were dismounting, thank God.

Soon enough, I dismounted next to them. I resisted the urge to kiss the rocky substrate at my feet. Ed and Rex were both smiling at me. They were probably glad I wasn’t dead yet, I thought suspiciously. They probably figured it would be more fun to prolong my angst as long as they could and would try to kill me later in the day. I mustered control of my wild thoughts. “What’s up?” I said.

Rex turned, and pushed into the heavy brush behind him, and beckoned that I would follow. He bent over, moved some rocks and leaves to the side, and slowly uncovered the hinged lid of a large wooden box, the top of which was flush to the surface of the dirt. Someone had carefully dug and set it deep in the rocky ground.

We were in the absolute middle of nowhere. It would be like finding a wooden chest on the dark side of the moon. “What’s going on here, Rex?”

“You’ll see.” He just smiled. He always smiled.

He lifted the lid, and in there was an old gasoline engine, and a Gerry can with five gallons of gasoline.

“What in the…?”

“It’s a pump,” Rex said. “See—it’s just a water pump. Ed and I pack a five gallon can in here horseback every week or two. We’ll just fill it up right now, and start it. It’ll run itself dry, but then the stock tank is full up in the basin. See that little trickle of water way down underneath the pump going into that little metal bucket dug into the ground?”

I leaned into the box, and sure enough, a tiny spring emerged from the rocks there, with a steady flow. I put my hand down there, and felt the icy and pristine coldness. I dipped my hand into the bucket, and drank a handful. It was beautiful, akin to gold inside that big wooden chest. It was hidden treasure in this rock-strewn high desert landscape where rain falls were few and water ran rarely. Springs were special in these mountains, and these old boys knew that the type of plants above ground betrayed the secret of water below ground, and they were sharing some of it with their cows…what cows?

There wasn’t a cow who would walk across this precipice studded face. The only critters that could thrive on this rock pile were wild bighorn sheep. I flashed a question back to Rex and Ed: “What does that water pump to?”

Ed’s rattly voice told the tale. “When Rex and I found that little spring, we dreamed up this idea to pack a plow up here and our team of draft horses, and lay a pipeline across this face. Poly pipe had just come out, and we thought we’d give it a try.” They both were smiling now, and they guided me with their eyes across the steep mountainside to a barely discernible scratch I could see over the half mile of face in our view-shed.

I looked back at their smiling (and now quite proud) faces, horrified. “You mean you plowed a pipeline in across that rock strewn face with a team of horses and didn’t kill anybody?”

They both nodded. Said Ed, “It was only about 2 miles. We wanted some water out on that point by the ridge; there was some real good grass up there, and we could mebbe put a little jag of cattle up there for a month or two. We’ll go up there, today. You’ll see.”

“You got a tank up there?”

“Yep.” More smiling…Proud nods.

“Let me guess. You packed this pump up here horseback, and thousands of feet of pipeline…and you managed to put a 500 gallon steel 8 foot long 3 feet deep stock tank on the back of a horse.” I winced.

“Yep.” Says Rex. He was beaming now. “He couldn’t really see cause it kinda went over his whole body like a lampshade, see?”

“Yep.” Says Ed. “But he trusted us, and we made him plum comfortable, and we just led him up there.”

I was thinking they should have put a lampshade on my head. His gravelly voice trailed on, describing just how they made their way up there, while I thought, “Yep, across some of the most brutally vertical country in North America…”

“Critters like it too, ya know.” Rex says. “Elk and bighorn sheep and everyone likes that water way up on that ridge. Saves them a walk to the bottom of the canyon.” He nodded, and turned to fire up the generator. He pulled the cord, and it sputtered to life. He carefully closed the treasure chest, put the rocks and brush back on it, and emerged from the bushes.

I looked at the rocks and brush as he walked out of there, and wondered for a minute just who might ever want to tamper with it, as there wasn’t another human for 35 miles. I was going to ask a question, and looked up at the two cowboys, already swinging back up into their saddles. They looked over at me, smiling. “Yep. Them critters sure do like it,” said Rex.

After some less-than-placid time in sweaty and slick saddle, we broke out onto the ridge again via another game trail through the rocks, and crossed over into the rolling meadows of the nameless basin where they set that stock tank 20 years ago. When we rode up, we met a little herd of their mountain bred Black Angus cows, drinking deeply from the cool waters of the tank. Our horses did the same, as even late in the day, the sun was still hot.

I stepped off to get a drink from the pipe, filling my canteen. I offered a drink to Ed and Rex. Nope. In fact, every time I rode with them, they never drank that I noted. They hardly even ate.

I looked over their tattered cowboy hats across the rippled landscape. Over wave after wave of mountain ranges, I could see the White Cloud peaks in the distance, some 50 miles away. Occasional spots of snow could still be seen up there, in spite of it being hot August. In all directions, I could see no sign anywhere that other humans existed. Just mountains, clouds and sky.

I looked again at Rex and Ed, and back at the stock tank, full of the glistening waters that the cows were coming back to after we pulled back a few feet. These men could do anything. They would at least try anything. It never occurred to them that they couldn’t. But yet, they were humble. I was probably the first person they had ever told about what they had done, and I was grateful for it.

They, and other hardy central Idaho residents, sowed in me a resourcefulness and care for the land that I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. They weren’t tamers of horses and the West. They were part of the landscape. The rugged and endless ranges of mountains were mirrored in the leathery ripples on their weather and work-beaten hands and faces.

They blended into the country, and truly lived in harmony with it. They understood the land, and the husbandry of it. Their cows and horses trusted them with abandon. It was many times that I saw Ed, alone, silhouetted high on a distant rocky ridge, guiding 12 of his 225 cows and calves to a little meadow he spotted on his trusty gelding, Frog. He was not only a cowboy; he was a shepherd of cattle. All of those animals trusted the old boy. Cows looked to him for the meadow of grass; horses figured, well, if Ed wants to go there, it must be fine.

It’s now been nearly 25 years that I got to ride with Ed and Rex. I’m less of a greenhorn now after riding horseback all these years, but still learning. They are both gone, but it was just enough time to take some lessons to heart. Like that “treasure chest”, which I am sure is still stuck on that mountainside now unused, (since nobody but Rex and Ed knew about it), the lessons of trust still endure in me. It’s my turn. They’ve passed the baton of their wisdom on.

What I mostly learned from them is the importance of trust and integrity. They trusted each other, the land, their horses, and their cattle. Trust…meaning one can be relied on. It starts from being a trustworthy steward of these animals we keep; sometimes there’s a lot of ground work that has to be undertaken before a saddle or draft horse becomes a willing partner. They learn that we are consistent, that we can be relied on to always work with them with kindness but firmness. Our cattle trust us. They know we will provide for their needs. They see us coming, and they know we are about to open the gate to new grass, or bring a bale of fragrant hay.

Then, the other end of that trust is that we have connected with customers that have embraced the idea of partnership, and the importance of trust that a partnership requires. Although they can’t begin to know all aspects of what we do to present exceptional food for their table, they know enough about our relationship with land and animals to trust us for the rest.

Several years ago after Ed passed away, I stopped by to chat with Mark, another “apprentice” of Ed and Rex. I was in Mark’s office, and behind his cluttered desk was a bulletin board clogged up with haphazardly tacked up Kodacolor photographs. As we chatted on, I unconsciously scanned the curled up, partly faded, torn and dog-eared images on the board, and as my eyes rested on one in particular I broke into a grin.

It was trust. In full Kodacolor.

Ed was wearing the same trail beaten clothes I had seen him in those years ago (did he sleep in them?). He was smiling, standing upright with a running, noisy and smoky chainsaw in his hands, reaching high and quite dangerously to a tree limb above his head. He had already cut several limbs off the tree, as I noted from the fresh cut saw faces next to the one he had his eye on.

Frog, his spunky mustang trail horse (I saw him buck Ed off once), was also in the picture. Ed didn’t even have him tied; the rope he used for reins just lay on the ground next to the limbs at his feet. Frog’s restive eyes just said that he was quite comfortable in spite of all the noise, smoke and falling branches.

Frog was also comfortable in spite of the fact that eighty year old Ed’s slick soled cowboy boots were firmly planted on the seat of his saddle in the middle of Frog’s back. It gave him the height he needed, after all. God didn’t make Ed tall. Instead, He gave him a trusty partner named Frog. And it was enough.

Thanks for being our partners.
Happy Trails to you all.
Glenn, Caryl, Girls and Cowboys at Alderspring.