It is the first day of a six day pack trip and we are heading off into the mountains.
I’m always excited to go. Leah and I have the guests on their riding horses, the packhorses loaded up, packs covered with a canvass tarp and tied down with a diamond hitch.
Canvas, ropes and leather; the technology of mountain packing has not changed much in the past couple of hundred years, other than now the pack boxes are made of plastic instead of leather, or wood.
We will set out with our guests on yet another journey up into the wild mountains of the North. It is truly wild country here, without roads or even human trails. We go where we please, sometimes exploring and sometimes showing off our favorite places. We follow wild herds of caribou and bison, search for grizzly, moose, and wolves.
Our horses are a dependable, tough and good natured lot. We have a motto, “never trust a horse you don’t trust, but trust a horse you do”. We’ve trained most of these boys ourselves (whom are all geldings to keep things a bit quieter), from either young that we’ve raised or taken on as four year olds from feral herds.
Remarkably, with some patience and understanding of where they’ve come from, the feral ones have been very easy to train. Once they trust us and all of our gear, the idea of walking in single file through the bush and over the mountains is already in them. With some more training they can graduate from carrying packs to carrying people. Most of our saddle horses are trained to be real riding horses, responsive to the ques of their rider, while others have been trained to simply carry the person and follow the leader (“dude horses” for our absolute novice riders).
We spend each spring training everyone to a new level. They are all draft crosses, very sturdy, strong legs and feet, with lots of brains between their ears. We’ve seen from experience how lighter high-strung quarter horse types (“southern horses” to us) can’t function in this environment or at this job. Our boys don’t panic, they don’t hurt themselves and they are not afraid of the wild animals that we spend our time following.
Once we set out we spend the first day following a trail that years ago I blazed with an axe through the forested valley up to the alpine meadows of the Yukon’s Coast Mountains. Once above the trees we will travel along caribou trails up and over mountain passes, across high plateaus and between sheer peaks. We will travel each day as far as we like and make camp in the nicest place we find each night. No signs of people, just caribou, moose, bear, wolf and horse tracks.
Wolves are around us:
The first night of this trip we make camp beside a large meadow that was formed from a drained beaver pond. A beaver worked hard to build a dam, which flooded the forest, drowning the trees, then the beaver family must have been killed (probably eaten by a pack of wolves in the spring) and the dam broke, draining the valley which has now been replaced with lush green grass. It is now a perfect horse camp, with nice hills all around, abundant grass, a meandering stream through the middle and lots of mature spruce trees along the edges providing plenty of dry firewood.
The horses are all tethered or hobbled (depending on their individual habits of wandering in the night), the tents are up, the guests are chatting about their own show jumping horses and how they would compare (no comparison) to these guys negotiating through the rough terrain that they have just experienced. Suddenly we hear my favorite sound; the howling of wolves. It is a sound that will get anybody’s absolute attention. Whether it’s a person coming from a country that has long lost its wolves, or every moose, deer, caribou and elk in the valley, everyone stops to listen.
I look up and catch a glimpse of a black wolf trotting through the trees along the side of the hill to the south. Then, a minute later, a huge white wolf comes out of the forest into the meadow with the horses.
He is thick and mature looking with a big square head, at least twice the size of our big shepherd dog and pure white. He is the most beautiful animal I’ve ever seen.
With the guests in tow, I run over to the horses and escort the white wolf as he circles around and through all the horses. They move in closer together but then pretty much ignore him.
These boys have met wolves many times with us, and I’m sure that they know of many more that have been around that I was not aware of. Up here wolves do sometimes prey on horses.
There are feral horses in these mountains whose populations are likely kept in check by them. But it is usually only the very young, injured or very old that offer a realistic opportunity for a predator who knows that if it receives a jaw breaking kick during the hunt, then its own life is surely over. These wolves were probably just making the rounds of the valley as they have to each day of their lives and came in to test this herd for any weakness. However, all they found were nine very healthy, very strong, very confident big geldings who weren’t going to be eaten by wolves any time soon.
The horses all knew this and the wolves knew it also. All the while a third wolf howls from across the creek and up on a ridge to the south-west of us. The big white wolf then swims the stream and circles around us and camp, swims it again and walks around our tents eyeing us in a very relaxed manner. He then circles the camp and the horses one more time before trotting off to the East, probably hoping to run into an old worn out caribou bull.
I was not afraid for our safety but did have to reassure my guests. For some unknown reason wolves don’t prey on humans. In North America there has only been one confirmed wolf attack in the past two hundred years and because of its rarity there must have been something exceptional about the circumstances.
It’s a real privilege that we have here to be in the company of wolves and bears, and our guests feel that as well. To share the land with these great predators who have been exterminated from nearly all of their historical ranges. They are not to be feared but instead respected. They are what makes the wilderness here wild.
The next morning we packed up the three packhorses, saddled the saddle horses and rode up into the mountains and above the tree line. We would cross raging rivers, negotiate rocky passes, safely observe grizzly bears on the mountain side meadows, and ride among bands of caribou on the alpine tundra. We would camp and graze the horses in grassy hollows tucked out of the wind, drink from glacier streams, and look out at the whole wide world below us.
If you want to join us on a trip of a lifetime, please, contact Hidden Trails at 1-888-9-TRAILS
Or check out the website at: http://hiddentrails.com/tour/canada_yukon_grizzly.aspx
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