Saddle Sores : Sierra Horse Packers Come Under Environmental Criticism

BISHOP, Calif. —  Every year, the biggest weekend in this Eastern Sierra town is the springtime Mule Days Celebration, when tens of thousands of tourists watch mule races, mule-shoeing contests, a pack-animal parade and other exhibitions.

The event, begun by Sierra horse packers 28 years ago, is a festival of the packing industry, which annually carries thousands of people high into the Sierra back country to camp in style and go fishing, take photos or just admire the scenic surroundings.

The colorful horse packers who have been traversing the Sierra Nevada for more than a hundred years, and who blazed some of the first trails into the mountains, have played a large part in the history and identity of communities in this part of the Sierra.

But in a growing cultural clash, packers are coming under intense scrutiny and criticism from environmental and hikers groups that say the outfitters are given special access to the back country and cause unnecessary environmental damage.

And officials of the Inyo National Forest said that because of changing public expectations and their own recognition that heavily used back country areas need increased protection, they are being more exacting in regulating the activities of packers and other wilderness users.

A heated dispute developed earlier this year between packers and the U.S. Forest Service after agency officials proposed three-day suspensions for three of the 14 pack outfits in this part of the Sierra.

Although the suspensions were never imposed, pack station owners contend that some Forest Service employees are joining environmentalists and hikers advocates to force the packers out of business.

“We feel it’s a way to advance the desires of two people within the Forest Service to rid the mountains of all pack animals,” said a spokesman for the Eastern Sierra Pack Assn. “If you get citations or you get suspended, it becomes an economic hardship. They’re attacking our businesses, basically.”

Bill Draves, owner of the Rainbow Pack Station located near South Lake, said the incidents of going off the trail and other violations cited by the Forest Service were blown out of proportion.

“There’s so little for them to do . . . but exaggerate an incident like going around a trail which is 5 feet under ice and snow,” he said.

Forest Service officials said that the proposed suspensions were only intended to protect wilderness areas and trails. “We don’t take punitive measures lightly at all,” said Dennis Martin, Inyo National Forest supervisor. “We strongly support the pack industry and have no desire whatsoever to see their businesses impacted.”

The proposed suspensions were over violations of the Forest Service’s 1996 operating plan for the packers. The plan included directions to stay on designated trails rather than detour to avoid downed trees, and to refrain from digging up soil to spread over snowbound trails. Pack station owners said that the requirements were unreasonable and forced them to operate in a way that is unsafe.

“In recreational packing, there can be trees down across a dangerous portion of trail,” said one longtime Sierra pack station owner. “A packer would have to get off his horse. There’s no room to tie up your horses, and there’s a safety factor to leaving your party unattended.

“The Forest Service has come out with the position that they don’t want any material dug up to sand trails. You have to pack sand from the trail head,” he added. “But you can only ride so far, and it’s quite a chore to try to carry sand all the way across the snow up a hillside to the top of the pass.”

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But Deputy Forest Supervisor Bill Bramlette said that at the beginning of the season last spring, packers were “pushing too hard to get into the back country, and we started getting a lot of resource impacts. It would take them five minutes to get off their horse and cut a tree out or deal with some debris on the trail. Instead of doing that, they were riding around it with a pack string, creating a completely new trail system.”

In addition, he said, some packers were taking an excessive amount of sand from mountainsides to cover snow-packed trails. A pack string detouring off trails can cause erosion and damage to watersheds and vegetation, Forest Service officials said.

Environmental and hikers’ groups say that in the past, packers have received unfair privileges in the back country, compared to backpackers, and that they have been allowed to cause environmental damage without being penalized sufficiently.

“One of the big issues concerns equity of access,” said Gary Guenther, a former employee of the Inyo National Forest and a member of the environmental group Wilderness Watch. “We’ve had these quotas that have restricted hikers’ access by about 35% to protect the resource. But on the other side, I see a trend that commercial pack use has increased. There are really no limits on the amount of commercial stock use.”

The groups cited incidents in which one pack outfit cut down hundreds of trees in a back country area and another removed a large section of trail.

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“I think that many of the commercial outfitters in the Eastern Sierra follow the regulations, but there’s at least a few that don’t, and that has a negative impact on the resource,” Guenther said. “I think if packers all followed the regulations and were really progressive, you would not have a lot of the conflict that is brewing right now.”

Bette Goodrich, the local representative from Wilderness Watch, said that more people are becoming concerned about environmental issues. “The environmental community in the Eastern Sierra is growing, and there are more people becoming involved and asking questions of the Forest Service,” she said.

The conflict has intensified because the Inyo National Forest is in the process of developing a new management plan for the John Muir, Ansel Adams, Monarch and Dinkey Lakes wilderness areas.

Mark Berry, who owned the Rainbow and Onion Valley pack stations during the 1980s, said that if packers imposed a weight limit on the gear they and their customers took into the back country, they could use fewer pack animals and reduce impact on the land.

“Most packers are still packing the same way they did 50 years ago,” he said. “There are many things that we could do to change our trips that would reduce the number of pack animals. That would actually cut the packers’ overhead, make them more money, reduce the annual impact.

“But packers aren’t evolving very fast. They’re still packing the cast iron and funky pot sets, and we could replace all of that,” he said.

Moderates on both sides of the issue said that because it is in all of their interests to preserve the wilderness areas, packers, hikers and environmentalists should be working together to improve protection of the areas rather than fighting with each other.

“Environmentalists attacking packers are making a big mistake,” said James Wilson, conservation chairman of the local National Audubon Society chapter and owner of a store here that sells backpacking equipment.

“If the packers and the hikers could have a little more vision, we would realize that in the long run we have a lot in common and we need each other. It’s stupid to be ripping each others’ throats out.”