Ol' Wrist Breaker

We headed up the trail leading Tequila. Marty was on his best behavior, but he was always like that until something blew him up. According to the boys, that could be anything out of the ordinary. At 12,000 feet we reached the 99 switchbacks and I started loose herding Tequila in front of me. When we got to Weeping Rock near the 55th switchback, I watched Tequila tip toe across and realized that this 30 foot section of trail which usually ran with water was, instead, frozen solid. Looking down the 400 foot drop under us, I decided that Marty and I would both have a better chance if we did this separately. Not realizing that we were already on the ice, I swung down on the inside. Next thing I knew I was lying flat on my back on the ice, my feet hanging off in space, looking straight up at the horse's belly. As I unsuccessfully tried to scramble out on the inside, I wondered if Marty might not consider this one of those out-of-the-ordinary things worth blowing up about. He didn't move a muscle. Unable to climb the ice, I had to roll over, scrabble around, and crawl on my side along the few inches of ice-covered rock between his right hind leg and the cliff edge. Ol' Wrist Breaker never even stirred. I was really beginning to like this horse.

The rest of the trip in towards Crabtree was pretty easy if you don't count balancing two horses in a pile of talus while 25 boy scouts and 25 burros work their way around you as being any big deal. I found the poor little sick boy at Guitar Lake. He was 6'4", weighed 210 pounds, and seemed more stoned than sick. Most likely, he had the pulmonary edema that came with altitude sickness. Regardless, I figured if I just got him on Tequila, that little horse would bring him out safe. The real problem was his backpack. It was huge and must have weighed 40 or 60 pounds. There was no way Tequila could carry the boy and his pack. I knew Marty could carry the weight so I put it on and crawled aboard. It stuck up a good six inches above my head which worried me but didn't seem to bother good old Marty. We started up the long pass toward home. The kid didn't seem to have any idea what was going on, but Tequila took care of him.

The Overhanging Rock ( Photo Courtesy Chris The Last Adventurer) Another View of the Overhanging Rock ( Photo Courtesy John McCall)

Between Trail Junction and Trail Crest there is a piece of trail that I have always hated. It is narrow and there is an overhanging rock. While you are ducking that rock, you can look 500 feet straight down just past your right boot. Coming up on this spot, I began to imagine that I would catch that big, old pack on the overhanging rock and fall 500 feet before I bounced the first time. Trying to concentrate on arguing myself out of panicking by being calm and logical, I was two inches from the rock when I realized that I really was going to hit the damn thing. I grabbed for the horn. Too late! The pack hit. I was shoved onto Marty's rump, my spurs buried in his flanks, my fingernails buried in the bottom of a saddlehorn I couldn't quite reach. Wedged in place, looking 500 feet straight down at the cliffs and talus below me, I let out a panicked scream. If ever a horse had cause to blow up, this was it. But Marty didn't blow up. He just froze in place.

There was nothing I could do but wait to die. After a few more minutes, Marty let out a sigh and began to ease backwards. He leaned back just until the pack slipped loose from the rock. With the grace of a dancer, he swung his body, me, and the pack out and around the overhanging rock. Then with one dazed pack cook still sitting on his rump, Marty walked quietly up the trail. Good Ol' Wrist Breaker.

When I regained my wits, I quickly scrambled back into the saddle. I checked on the kid on Tequila. He didn't seem to realize anything had happened, but Tequila was bring him along fine. We topped the pass and headed on down the mountain. At Weeping Rock, we both got off and led our animals gingerly across the ice. Getting back on with that pack was getting to be a major pain, but by now I was determined to deliver it safely along with its owner. As we jumped down all the big steps in the trail near Consultation Lake, I could feel the pack putting black and blue marks above my kidneys with each jump. I was really starting to hate that thing. Late in the day we finally reached the pack station where I handed the kid and his pack over to his grateful group leader. Being the only crew member there, I finished the evening by finding the 25 visiting burros a corral and some feed, taking care of our stock, and giving Marty and Tequila a big bait of extra grain.

I guess that's the end of the story except for a couple of things I heard later. The first is that the damn kid's damn backpack was stolen out of the campground that very night. I should have left the damn thing up on the mountain. The second is a whole lot sadder. That fall Marty bucked off a deer hunter and hurt him bad. The hunter got well, but Marty was sold onto the killer truck. It broke my heart when I heard that. I guess no one will ever know why he chose to save my life twice on that single day. I hope where he is now is all clear streams and green meadows. So long, Ol' Wrist Breaker.

Trail Crest on the Mt. Whitney Trail (Photo courtesy Peter Burke)

A vertical view from the area of the
"overhanging rock."
Photographer Unknown

Another view in the area of the "overhanging rock."
Photographer Unknown

I tell a lot of stories about being a backcountry cook, but not many of them describe the actual cooking. Many of the required skills are lost in antiquity. If you aren't lucky enough to find an old timer who will share their knowledge with you, you're probably in trouble. There are no schools or books that teach you how to do this stuff. If you run across a book on Dutch oven cooking, it will usually start out talking about counting the number of charcoal briquettes. Right there you know the author has never cooked any farther from his house than the back yard. Well, I've been just plain lucky and over the years a lot of talented people have shared their high country cooking secrets with me. I suspect they figured that if they didn't help I might end up poisoning or starving a whole lot of folks. Anyway. I'm going to tell you a little about these people, and if you listen careful you might learn a few of their secrets.

The first cooks I worked with were at Mt. Whitney Pack Trains, where I got to work with Bruce and Charles Morgan and Barbara Morgan Jefferson. Being a butcher in the off season, Charles Morgan taught me a lot about handling meat in the high country (no pun intended). In those days, no one froze the meat or used ice chests. Meals were planned in an order based on which meal kept longest. You planned any meal requiring ground meat for the first day. Any poultry or fish had to be used in one or two days. Fresh pork was only good for about three days. From then on until around seven or eight days you used beef or lamb. After that the menu needed to include cured meats like ham and corned beef. Finally, if you went over 12 days without a resupply, you went to canned meats or dried pastas like tortellini. To make sure that you meat was fresh when you needed it, Charles taught me how to keep the meat from spoiling. Every night you would wait until after dark, unwrap all the meat, and spread it out on the table. This chilled the meat and allowed the surfaces to dry out. First thing in the morning, you would wrap it in fresh white butcher paper, put it in a white cloth sack, and roll it in your sleeping bag. When you were ready to use it, you unwrapped the meat and used a knife to peel off the outer layer which was like jerky. Inside, the meat was fresh and delicious. Then you would cut it into steaks, roasts, chops, or stew meat depending on what the menu called for. On one large trip Charles actually carried along the entire forequarter of a steer which he cared for in the same way. Of course, it was so large that he had to hang it up in a tree rather than put it on a table. Charles taught me several other things too, like that if you overslept when you were supposed to be up cooking, you might find a basin of ice cold water poured over your head. He also taught me some new words the day he caught me using his boning knife to chop carrots. Guess real cooks are a little sensitive about their knives.

The most memorable of my mentors was Barbara Jefferson. Barbara was born to the packing business and grew up in the little town of Lone Pine knowing everything there was to know about packing. Quiet and serene, Barbara was often the only real grown up in a business where most of the crew were still children at heart. She taught me how to be a station cook and a trail cook, how to organize menus and supply lists, how to create dishes where you had no supplies, and how to serve a dinner for thirty when you had planned for ten. She was a born teacher and would send me off to do tasks that I believed to be impossible. Once she told me to make a pineapple upside down cake for dinner. We were at Little Whitney Meadow and I knew that we hadn't planned to bring any of the things needed for such a task. Being as Barbara was the kindest person that ever lived; I knew she wouldn't set me a task that really couldn't be done. I started searching for the ingredients, keeping in mind that everything I used for this would have to be replaced for its original use. For example, I started with the canned pineapple and brown sugar that were to be the glaze for the next night's ham. I replaced that glaze with one based on apricot jam and Worchestershire sauce. We were heavy on pancake mix so I used it for the base for my cake batter. Extra flour (for thickening gravy), eggs (from breakfast) and sugar (from that meant for the coffee) kept it from rising too high and made it more cake like. Well, you get the idea. It turned out to be a cake and I was so proud I could hardly stand myself. Barbara just smiled quietly like she knew all along that I could do it.

In later years, it seemed like I learned backcountry cooking skills from everyone I worked with. I learned all the serious Dutch oven cooking skills I know in a single week from a little old man named Dink who was packing for Reds Meadows at the time. He taught me how to choose the right wood and build the right fire, how to preheat the lid while burning the wood down to coals, how to make hooks to handle the super hot lids, how to use little stones to raise the baking pan to keep it from burning, and how to estimate your cooking times. With these few skills you can bake or roast anything in a Dutch oven that you could do in your kitchen at home. Of course, it can be a little unpredictable. I remember one day when I was working for North Lake Pack and we were in at McClure Meadow. I had to make two batches of brownies. I had two identical Dutch ovens and round cake pans. I built two fires as alike as I could make them out of limb wood from the same tree. I mixed a double batch of brownie batter, and split it between the two pans. Cooked for equal lengths of time, one batch was perfect brownies and the other was so black and hard that we used it to play Frisbee on the meadow. Ah, well, you can't win them all.

When I got to Rock Creek, the best thing I learned about was five-gallon square tins. When you put handles on them, they make perfect water buckets. They fit right down in your pack boxes so they are easy to pack along, weighing very little and taking up no room at all. They can also be heated on the stove for wash water, and when they eventually wear out along the bottom, you can turn them on their sides and use them for ovens. Seriously, just lay one flat on your steel stove top and close the open end with foil. They will bake roasts, pies and cakes just like your oven at home. You should see the looks on the dudes' faces when after a layover day in the wilderness, you feed them prime rib for dinner.

Now most of the actual cooking stories you hear will involve food disasters. Every cook seems to have a few mistakes hanging over her like a dark cloud from the past. Mine was the time the creamed tuna got scorched. It was on a huge Sierra Club trip with 117 people. That much scorched tuna really stinks. According to Tommy Jefferson he could smell it three miles from camp and prayed all the way in that it wasn't OUR dinner.

Marge London was famous for the time she put an unopened can of brown bread in with a ham she was baking. It exploded and blew the ham clear to the other side of the camp. I remember a first year cook who mixed up two different sets of directions for reconstituting dried scalloped potatoes. The result was a large pot full of thin cream with some chunks of potato floating in it. She just served it before the salad and told the guests that it was potato soup. Another beginner made a potentially much more serious mistake. She mistook the chlorinated lime for flour and used it in the stew. Fortunately, it smelled so bad no one would touch it. Wes, one of the Rock Creek packers, tells a story about working with a cook who had her own horse that she let hang in close to her kitchen. One morning she whipped up the eggs for scrambling and left the bowl on the edge of the table. Her pet pony backed up to the table and let fly with something liquid and green. Wes says it missed the eggs by fractions of an inch, but when the cook went ahead and fried those eggs up, nobody much seemed to want them for breakfast. Though no one ever forgets them, those kinds of accidents are few and far between. Mostly pack cooks produce miracles on a regular basis.

One good trick is to never tell the guests what's for dinner that night. That way if things go wrong and you have to figure out something else to serve, they never know. The best trick of all in this business is to wait and cook anything new or tricky on a layover day while the guests and packers are out of camp. Then if it doesn't work out, you throw it in the bushes and fix a different dish. The only problem with these approaches is that when you have to figure out something else to do and you come up with something absolutely brilliant, nobody ever compliments your genius because they never knew you were in trouble in the first place. Guess it's better that way. Good luck with your camp cooking, and maybe someday I'll get to sample some of your work around the campfire.

The "Camp Cook's Troubles" by Charlie Russell - 1912

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