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 Mt. Whitney Packers of the 1940s - 1950s |
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Sherman Steven's Sawmill |
Leftovers
from a bygone era. The old Sherman Steven's sawmill located at Cottonwood
Creek near the junctures of the Carroll Creek and Cottonwood
Creek trails provided lumber for the Cerro Gordo Mines, Cartago , and Swansea;
in addition to providing lumber for the charcoal kilns near Swansea
for the silver mines of Cerro Gordo. The charcoal was hauled
across Owens Lake by the Bessie Brady, one of two steamers which provided
the charcoal to the Cerro Gordo Mines. These are probably some
of the last surviving pictures in the history of this sawmill.
When I first packed into the area in the summer of 1965 these
items were still intact. the next summer, when they were constructing
the Horseshoe Meadows road, vandals had already burned these
last vestiges of the sawmill to the ground. Another piece of
early California history was lost forever, ruined by those who
had no respect for it or others who might enjoy it in the future. |
 Remains of the Sherman Steven's sawmill at the head of Cottonwood Canyon - 1950s |
 Remains of the Sherman Steven's sawmill at the head of Cottonwood Canyon - 1950s |
by Vincent Butler
Packing lumber out of the Carroll Creek Pack Station |
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 L/R: ? (back), ?, Wendell Gill (alongside Snake the Mule), ?, ? |
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 Finally, all loaded up, the bucking over and ready to go. |
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 Packing hay |
 Mounted: Bill Smart packing firewood. (1), (2) |
 Mounted: Bill Smart packing hay. (1), (2) |
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Whether it was
lumber at the Carroll Creek pack station or logs or hay at the
Whitney Portals pack station, packers have enough ingenuity to
pack anything onto a mule! The mule most likely will not cooperate
with you at first, especially if the load extends above or beyond
his ears; but, packer persistence will pay off. Take your pick
- watermelon, sides of beef, 300 pound stoves, dunnage, oats,
barbed wire, dynamite, canned goods, dry goods, lettuce, mining cable, etc. - if you've packed for
any length of time, you have encountered any or all of these
loads. Once you've obtained the mules cooperation, the next feat
is to pack-up, balance and tied down the load. Balancing can often times be more of a challenge than actually getting the mules cooperation. I mean balancing without using stones in your load. Only the most inexperienced and lamest of packers would make his mules pack stones! I had more than one load fall off of a mule. What I thought was well balanced in the cold of the morning was something totally opposite in the heat of the day. And, believe me, there is nothing a mule dislikes more than a load which starts slipping off to one side and down to his belly! I recall one trip over Snow Summit out of Bridgeport when I was packing dunnage with boxes of lettuce perched on top of the dunnage. When the load finally did slip (in the heat of the day), thankfully it was on a long flat section of the trail, the mule bucked lettuce and dunnage everywhere. I managed to eliminate lettuce from the salad menu for several nights of the trip. |
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 A creek crossing that every packer dreams of. |
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 Traversing one of the Palisade Lakes. |
 Traversing one of the Palisade Lakes. |
There's
nothing a packer likes better than to pack up and enjoy a good
ride in the saddle to the next camp. Ah, just to lead your string
of mules across of stream while you're singing "Red River
Valley" (or in my case during the late '60s - "Hey
Mr. Tambourine Man"), what a life. But packing was not always
that romantic or without incident. Sometimes you were forced
to loose herd your mules through lakes, over snow banks and through
precarious rocky or sandy switchbacks. Occasionally these "adventures"
resulted in wrecks where either the load or the mule were lost. The mule in the lower left was fortunate and only lost his load. The mule on the right, however, paid for the wreck with his life. Wrecks seldom resulted solely because of the mule. Usually it was the result of an inexperienced or, most often, inattentive packer. One thing your mules demand is attention, and lots of it. |
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 Mule collapsed in the snow. |
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Carroll Creek Pack Station Corrals |
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Up
until approximately 1965 nearly every packer that worked for
Mt. Whitney Pack Trains, since it first began back when Frank Chrysler and Ted Cook owned the outfit,
packed out of the old Carroll Creek Pack Station. If you look close enough in the photo to the lower right you'll see a packer with his string of mules heading up the Carroll Creek trail. From Carroll Creek one had easy access to Cottonwood, Army, Mulkey and Trail Passes, Rock Creek, the South Fork of the Kern River, Golden Trout Camp and the golden trout fishing paradise of the Cottonwood Lakes. It was a tragedy when the house which contained all of the old packing records dating back to the Chrysler and Cook days were lost in an accidental fire in the late 1960s. It was even more of a tragedy when the Horseshoe Meadows road was blasted across the face of the mountain destroying the old trail and opening up the backcountry to vandals, litterers, and fishing poachers. This resulted in the closing of all of all but the uppermost Cottonwood Lakes to fishing, the burning down of the old Sherman Stevens Timber Sawmill, and trail head quotas. All of this because some folks thought they could exploit the Horseshoe Meadows area into a ski resort. This area is not like Mammoth to the north with it's approximate 200 inches of annual snowfall. Here the snowfall is meager because it is bled out of the clouds by the eastern crest of the Sierra Nevada. |
 Carroll Creek Pack Station Corrals |
 Carroll Creek Pack Station Corrals - Pack train heading up the Carrol Creek trail in the center of the photo |
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1995 Mt. Whitney Packer's Reunion | |
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Packing & High Sierra Stories | |
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More Mt. Whitney Packers of the 1940s and 1950s |
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Wildflowers of the Sierra Nevada |
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One Packers High Sierra Experience |
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  Sign Guestbook View Old Guest Book Entries Oct 1999 - Feb 2015 (MS Word) |
 CONTACT the Pigmy Packer |
 View Guestbook View Old Guest Book Entries Oct 1999 - Feb 2015 (PDF) |
This page was last updated on
22 April 2024