Category Archives: Working Animals

Horseback Tours Denali National Park

I had a rare treat last Wednesday, the privilege of driving back into Denali National Park on a private bus, back into the depths of a wonderland of animal, plant and geological diversity that has few rivals on earth.

180px-Mount_McKinley_and_Denali_National_Park_Road_2048pxThe park is the size of the state of Massachusetts. The only road goes a mere 94 miles in, but a wild and winding, cliff-hanging dirt road, passing Denali, and ending finally on the banks of Moose Creek. Closed to the public unless they have a special pass, one must take a bus to avoid harassing wildlife, who conducts their daily activities within full view of passers-by since they are not hunted or chased.

We saw 2 sow grizzlies and their twins foraging for vegetation and voles, a lynx, moose, caribou, a golden eagle, beaver, an assortment of ducks and raptors. All under a vivid blue sky with the towering white hump of “The Great One,” more aptly named by the indigenous peoples here than a US President, McKinley, who had never stepped foot in Alaska.300px-Grizzly_Denali_edit

I was privileged to have worked as the wrangler at the end of the road at a remote lodge that offered horseback tours into the Kantishna Hills, a mere 20 miles from the north face of Denali, years ago. For 5 summers I took small groups of adventurers up a creek and into the hills, where no one else ever went. We often passed grizzly tracks and a few munching off the trail, my heart pounding but keeping a steady pace with my guests behind me. My favorite part was climbing out of valley with a fast moving creek, moving steadily up past treeline and into the alpine tundra, while Denali peeked from behind another hill and then came into full view, filling my field of vision with the enormity of the highest mountain in North America, and the tallest mountain in the world from base to top. I entered a cathedral of such grand proportions anything man-made was totally insignificant by comparison.

konjourneydenali1997 copyThe horses stretched out as we climbed higher, my hands in their mane,
my entire body alive and connected. I loved sharing this sacred place. At the top the horses would rest and we’d eat lunch in the tundra, small plants entwined in an ecological dance of harmony: berries, flowers, grasses, mosses, lichens, dwarfed trees, with the north face of Denali facing ours.

Fires in Alaska

Kathy here.  The smoke from the two major fires in our area in the interior of Alaska, the Wood River and Minto Flat fires, rolled in last night so thick the wilderness was like a packed bar loaded with smokers. Visibility down to less than 100 feet, this in a land of broad vistas and big sky. Continual dry days (.44 inches of rain in July, driest on record) and high temperatures, in the 80’s and sometimes 90’s, and no end in sight, have fanned the flames of these fires, one within 20 miles of Fairbanks, to immense killers. The Minto fire, as of a few days ago, was already 350,000 acres, or 600 square miles, across the Nenana River from the small Athabascan village of Nenana where I spent 26 years. The effects on wildlife are  incomprehensible: birds too young to fly away, moose calves too small to run through the thick brush. Fox,lynx, wolves, bears, squirrels, all with young. The beavers can at least dive down into the lakes, but their lodges, their protection, could catch fire. And no rain in sight.

But the wild blueberries and raspberries are ripe and ready early, an important part of our food supply, Mother Nature’s yearly  free giveaway. Yesterday afternoon friend Pam and I went into the hills north of here and found large patches, but the odd thing was that the ground was so dry it broke off the branches of the berry bushes and lichen as we searched with our little buckets. Instead of a moist sponge, the tundra crackled with every movement. Uncovered ground was hard and split open like the photos of African droughts I’d seen in National Geographics.

Horrified I apologized to the little plants that should have sprung back, never having seen this in 35 years in this country. Many of the berries were small, after sitting in the hot, relentless sun and 24 hours of daylight since they formed. But our buckets were full when we left. Kept our eye out for a large black bear seen in the area, my .44 strapped to my hip, but he was thankfully feasting elsewhere.

Without rain the few hay farmers in our area are suffering, along with the horse owners. Each horse up here needs about 3 tons of hay per horse for the year. The oil based fertilizer they use cannot disintergrate and nourish the grass plants without water, which has never been a problem in the past. So no one uses irrigation. At the first cutting in July, bales per acres was about 20 % of the normal amount. I was shocked when I took my flatbed trailer into my favorite farmer’s fields and left with 15 bales instead of 65. The grass was just too short.

The changes we are seeing here are extreme, as last summer with constant, record rain and finally flooding. My life depends on the weather: hay for horses, salmon for the sled dogs, adequate snow for sled dog tours in the winter, and for the last12 or so  years we have seen changes beyond what is considered normal for this far north. Excessive snow this past March closed many of the trails to even snowmachines.In the backcountry snow would be up to the top of my legs in many places, and I am 5’10” with my boots on. On one trip I had to turn a 10 dog team around in a narrow trail, and found the leaders on top of me as I stepped off the trail and fell into the deep snow, my legs cemented into place. Chaos !

All of this tells me to be flexible, do not assume and predict. Just when I am at that age when I would like to settle back a bit, cozy in my knowledge of a land and it’s rhythms. But the dance has changed, and I better learn some new steps.

More About Jane

To add more about Jane  —  I don’t want her story to inflame the anti-dogmushersout there.   Her story is unusual, not born of intentional cruelty but human ignorance.

We dogmushers come in many personas, like horse owners, but most of us are kind and considerate of our animals. They are our canine family, our transportation, our athletic superheros who we depend upon to carry us through this often harsh and brutal land.  Mine are also my business partners. As with all animal partnerships, humans are the weak link, who sometimes lay the burdens of their own emotional misgivings or shaky egos upon these amazing beings.  But most of us love and care for them beyond anything the average person can understand.  They eat the best of meats, salmon, fats, and commercial dogfood. (My favorite costs nearly $50 for 40 lbs.)  They have sound houses with thick straw.   They are well-conditioned, and in that process can perform athletic feats beyond that of any known animal on this planet. Running and pulling a sled for 150 miles per day in sub-zero weather, day after day.  There are no reins, nothing to keep them moving only their own will.  They are bred for this and running is what they live for.  Trying to take one for a “walk” in the summer means you must have strong shoulders and hands. They cannot do anything but pull, and with a smile, while you struggle to keep up.

Living on the Edge on the High Desert of Washington

Tara Here. Now how I got here… That is a direct result of Intentional Manifestation.

In 2001 I ventured to North Dakota to try to “do life” with a man who represented himself as “a rancher.” All was not quite as he presented it during our courtship that began as an Internet romance. But oddly enough, I fell in love with his life and his ranch and his child and the man. I am writing a book, the working title for which is 48 Days in North Dakota in which I discuss small-scale ranching and the challenges presented when one tries to get into farming or ranching–having the passion but not the family experience.

Four years later I found the land I call The 3-Bell Ranch. It is everything I “put out there” almost ten years ago, even before my journey to North Dakota. There are acres and acres of pasture for my horses. I’m flanked by State land. The views here are absolutely breath-taking. The energy of the land soothes the soul and heals the body.

But it didn’t feel like that when I landed here a year ago!

The house was a ramshackle shack suffering from years and years of neglect from owners whose love of the land and passion for being orchardists led them to a life of the edge– the plight of small farmers, orchardists and ranchers all over this country. It took only two years of being paid late by the Gold-digger Co-op to launch the snowball of financial ruin that smashed them flat;  they were forced to rip out their cherry trees and apple trees –for here, in Central Washington, if you don’t maintain your trees (i.e. spray them), you must remove them. With the trees went the irrigation. Without irrigation, noxious weeds took hold. And without income from the land, the bank foreclosed.

I bought the land at auction – gambling that I would find water when a well was dug for household water. The well turned out to produce 35 gallons per minute, and was 180 feet deep. In a conversation with Fred Cook, of Cook’s Irrigation, I learned that 20 years ago, a well at this location would have only been ten or fifteen feet. The water table’s receding. Water rights are at risk. Without water the Okanogan Valley will consist of sagebrush, a bit of bunch grass and an array of noxious, invasive, non-native species such as hounds tongue, Russian and Diffuse Knapweed, Baby’s Breath, Dog Bane, Saint John’s Wort, and so on and so forth. Without irrigation it will take 30 to 40 acres to feed a horse or steer during the growing season, but there would be no way to grow hay here except on small areas where the water table is so high that “sub-irrigated” grass will grow.

There is so much to learn about living in this country.

Water is precious. Every drop is precious. Without irrigation there would be no apple trees, no cherry trees, no pear trees, or hay crops or tomatoes or lettuce or any viable commercial crop.

People are on the edge here. When the recession struck the U.S., not many people  here felt it; they were already dirt poor. If you look at the second hand shops you see it. People use things far beyond their “worn” status; they use them until they’re spent– beyond thread bare– beyond “worn out.” They’ve been sewn, glued, welded, mended time and time again until there’s just nothing left to mend.

—  LIVING ON THE EDGE, PART II —

Years ago I was part of a cadre of teachers in Washington who had been selected to teach other teachers how to use technology to improve student achievement. In our State-wide meetings, those from Eastern Washington used to complain that Western Washington controlled the State and that their needs were neither understood nor adequately addressed. They were so right. Eastern Washington is a different world. It’s beyond Beyond. People here are honest, true, and friendly. They take care of each other. There’s an unspoken pact of reciprocity.

In July 2009 I had the opportunity to spend several weeks in the company of some really amazing young men who installed permanent irrigation sets on the large, unwieldy portion of my land I refer to as the “back 40”– a 12.5 acre field that has been fallow for seven or eight years now. “We’ll get her done,” they’d say. “Don’t worry; you’re in good hands.”

A rational person would look up and exclaim, “No one can do that!” but here, everyone does the impossible. They have to. They have to rise to the occasion, to step onto that frayed tightrope believing that it will not snap under their weight, knowing even if it did, someone, a neighbor, a stranger, God perhaps, would catch them before they hit bottom.

“We’ll get her done,” is the ‘signature quote’ for the Okanogan. It’s a hard life. A life on the edge. There is a daily reminder that we are fragile, interconnected beings.

I feel at home here in this place where the word “impossible” does not exist. And so here I am with my horses, mules, pony, dogs and rabbits, living close to the land, documenting this existence through video and digital photography– my passions. Each year I share some of my favorite images of horses in a calendar I call Horse as Horse in Okanogan County. The calendar features my herd shot at liberty in wild areas of Central Washington. And my next project will be to create brief videos documentaries about agriculture in the Okanogan as well as training videos teaching people skills such as selecting irrigation systems, strategies for installing them on large tracts of land, repairing lines, sprinklers, etc. as well as instructing people about using horses in small scale farm operations.

A Story About Jane

Jane the Gentle Leader
Jane the Gentle Leader

Jane is a blue-eyed beauty, an awesome lead dog that was sold for $4,000 4 years ago from a retiring Iditarod musher to another. She was run too hard and injured, then traded to a veterinarian for vet work. She was made to run 60 miles at -65F
without conditioning and collapsed on the trail. She was then given to me (because it was figured she would never run again I’m sure.) Her original owner was stunned when he heard this story.

She had a slight shoulder injury when I got her. She is a gem, one of those rare leaders you can trust your life to…she is now 11 and in semi-retirement, relaxing under a shady tree as I write this. She is a gentle soul, and I shudder to think what she has been put through.

Last winter, after a huge snow, about 2 ft, our trail was obliterated. The snowmachine guy couldn’t find it in many places, which meant we would sink and flounder  without a base. We had guests, so I hooked up Jane and nine others, put the guests in and off we went. She found the original trail under all that snow.

I was screaming her name and yahooing and tears ran down my face. How these dogs do such things is nothing short of mindboggling.