Originally Posted by simonkenton7
One summer my buddy Marc and I decided we wanted to be Mountain Men. We were suburban boys from Atlanta. We decided to go to the wilderness of British Columbia. We got up there to the wild regions and we flew back into the bush with a pilot named "Midnight Jim" Anderson. His house was right on the Alaska Highway and he, believe it or not, used the Alaska Highway for a runway.

After Jim flew us in to the wilderness, we rented horses from a big game guide and we were off by ourselves for several months of wilderness adventure. Of course we had a pack horse. When we were doing our own mountain man training in Atlanta we got this book and this is how we learned how to pack a horse. We even built our own panniers from plywood.

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

On the drive up to BC from Atlanta we actually stopped by Joe Back's house in Wyoming and visited with him for several hours.


simonkenton7;
Top of the morning to you and all the rest of the participants here, I hope all is as well as can be in your respective lives.

This thread has been a lively, entertaining and sometimes even educational exchange, thanks to "most" of the participants for that. wink

The Joe Back book is absolutely wonderful and if anyone is even remotely interested in horse packing, horses or really fine pen and ink art work for that matter, I can heartily recommend it. As a by the way before I leave this part, I had a photocopy of the knots for tying my bags onto the saddle when our lives included horses and horse packing.

Thanks to JeffA for the photos, I always enjoy seeing strings of horses and how they're packed. Thanks for the bear photos too Jeff.

Anyways here's a couple more scans of pictures from ancient days in southern BC.

[Linked Image]

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Changing the topic to bear spray, I'll share the following story about it's effectiveness.

Once upon a time we had a cougar working the neighborhood regularly enough that it caused our neighbors enough concern they were considering purchasing a firearm to carry while they walked their ancient Golden Lab around the semi-rural area we call home. As they'd been traditionally anti-firearm of all sorts and had no clue how long it'd take them to legally acquire said arms up here in the so civilized north, I offered them a spare can of bear repellent.

This turned out to be fortuitous as one can only imagine what would've resulted if I'd loaned them say a 1911... eek

For reasons that were not clear to anyone relating the tale of woe after the fact, the safety tab was almost immediately discarded. Somehow in the narrow stairwell of their home, when the innocent senior citizen Lab and the neighbor's wife were descending said said stairwell, the can came out of her jacket pocket and as it bounced on each stair managed to go off directly into both the lady and the dog.

Perhaps now is the time to say neither occupant of the stairwell would have been considered a "small specimen", so then the gentle reader can better envision a large ancient Golden Lab attempting to run up the stairs to escape the demon mist which his formerly loving master was unleashing on him.

Honestly when she was telling me the story it was all I could do to keep it together. I will admit I absolutely could not when I relayed it to our family afterwards...... laugh

One daughter kept asking, "But Dad, why would she take the safety off, that doesn't make any sense?" laugh laugh laugh

Anyways, that's my bear spray story for now, but I do have another one for another day that interestingly enough involved a dog as well.

As my fellow BC friend 673 said, we have no shortage of bears here in south central BC and I very much suspect that many of the bear shootings do not get reported as life is much simpler sometimes when that happens. I'm not in any way, shape or form condoning anything that even has the whiff of illegality, merely stating an opinion on what I hear in the wind when I'm quiet and nothing more.

All the best to you all and do stay safe out there.

Dwayne

The most important stuff in life isn't "stuff"