HomeMy Public PortalAboutGarner, LarryA Tribute to Larry Garner
You don't meet a person like Larry Garner very often. In fact, you're lucky if you get to
know a Larry Garner once in your lifetime. Although his name may be a common one,
the Idaho backcountry icon Larry Garner was an uncommon man and as close to a model
human being as most of us will ever know. As a purveyor of the "golden rule ", Larry
was second to none.
In writing of my experiences as a forest ranger in the Idaho backcountry, I have devoted
quite a bit of prose to the younger, college age employees with their fresh and open -
minded eagerness to spending a summer season working in the backcountry and that, in
most cases, in later years these folks look back on their time in the backcountry as one of
the high points in their lives. In writing in this manner, I have been guilty of overlooking
the contribution that some of the older employees made to the daily operations of the Big
Creek Ranger District.
I first met Larry in the spring of 1957 when he was about 50. He held the job on the Big
Creek Ranger District that used to be titled Alternate Ranger. This was a position
somewhat like the Sergeants in the Army or the Chiefs in the Navy in that the Alternate,
as they were known, was the person who worked with projects on the ground and was
pretty well removed from most of the government paperwork that occupied so much of
the District Ranger's time.
As far as formal education went, Larry didn't have much, and might even have been
considered illiterate in the minds of some people. He had difficulty in writing and
completing such minor jobs as the required reports on small forest fires on the district.
But when it came to backcountry knowledge, he qualified for a Ph.D. He was a
woodsman, a horseman and mule packer, a camp cook, and generally fully in tune with
all things backcountry. He was a master of such tasks as working with pack and saddle
stock, camping in the mountains under adverse weather conditions, and practically any
job that involved working with his hands.
It is almost impossible to say enough good things about Larry Garner. He was honest to
a fault with a personality and vocabulary totally lacking in guile, bravado and profanity.
Because he was so laid back and low key, he was not the kind of individual who stood
out in a crowd; yet he had life figured out in that he was up -beat about most everything.
He was the kind of person who did not have many down days or spend much time being
mad at people or things. He liked people and people liked him. I don't think that he had
any enemies or that anyone ever bad - mouthed him. He was respected by all who knew
him including the hard to please types like FMO Jack Higby. His quiet demeanor and
"impish" smile often left many of us wondering what all was really going on in his head.
Over the years more than one bet was lost by those who believed Larry would eventually
be heard to swear, complain, or even yell loudly
He would take on any job sent his way, but his long suits were working with the young
seasonal employees and the pack and saddle stock. Ability to work with and be a mentor
to younger, inexperienced employees was very unusual for a packer. Larry's patience
with mules and trail crew kids was phenomenal. When you think about it, there is a
commonality of personality traits in young men and mules that may make Larry's dual
ability somewhat understandable. His slow, methodical packing style was inevitably
transferred to any young man (the crew was all male in those days) who showed an
interest. Pete Mourtsen told me that even today when he is faced with the task of
wrapping something, like an unusually shaped Christmas present, he still thinks back to
the lessons he learned from Larry about cargoing things of unusual shape to pack on the
mules.
Larry's extensive time spent in the backcountry, including many years spent as an
outfitter working out of Cold Meadows, also made him a walking history lesson. On
more than one occasion Larry would tie up his mules and lead the crew on a short walk to
a little known grave site or historic cabin. These impromptu side trips only happened
once the individual or crew had passed Larry's trustworthiness test. First year workers
were rarely, if ever, so treated. If prompted (usually back at camp), Larry would pass
along stories related to the sites which had been verbally relayed to Larry by "old- timers"
he had known. Larry was never known to quote anything from a written source.
Whether the stories were true or not, they added considerable intrigue to a long trail
swing.
I'm going to digress here a little and provide my take on the cult of mule whackers. The
heydays of the packer culture in the mountains of Central Idaho was way before my time
as ranger that started in 1957, but there were still a few men around whose primary
interest in life was working with pack and saddle stock. Some of the names that come to
mind are Bus Thrope, Dub Horn, Lafe Cox, Verl Potts, Arlo Lewis, Shorty Derrick, Jim
Porter and Larry Garner. With the exception of Jim Porter, these fellows are all dead
now, but it was my good fortune to have ridden a few miles with most of them and shared
a campfire or two. Most of these fellows had mellowed quite a bit from the character and
image of the old time packer. There are still stories of old time packers who had never
been seen without their wide brimmed cowboy hats, and people wondered if they even
slept with their hats on. Some of these guys were downright uncommunicative and
would hardly talk to anyone they felt was below their status (like college kids working on
a trail maintenance crew during their summer break from school, many of whom with
little outdoor experience.) Most of them liked for their mules to be on the wild side and
difficult for anyone other than them to handle. If a mule was prone to kicking while being
packed, that was fine with most of the old timers. They would somehow get a rope loop
around one of the mule's hind legs and lift and tie his hoof off the ground so the animal
was standing on three legs and unable to kick. With some of the old time packers, it was
standard practice to catch the pack stock by roping them with a lariat while running them
around in a circular corral. They could have trained them to come to a bucket of oats but
they liked playing cowboy. These guys were tough and they wanted their pack stock to
be the same way. Most of these mule skinners have gone into history now and will never
be replaced. Indeed, I just squeezed into the tail end of this era during my time as the Big
Creek Ranger.
The era of the Forest Service pack string was probably at its peak in the two or three
decades following the disastrous forest fires of 1910, the worst forest fires in American
history that burned over 3 million acres of prime, old growth timberlands in northern
Idaho and western Montana and killed 86 people. The 1910 fire season moved fire
control and forest protection to the top priority of the Forest Service in the management
of the western national forests. The agency started on a program of opening up the
country by improving access and communications. A system of forest fire lookouts for
early fire detection was constructed throughout the backcountry, telephone lines and trails
were built to service the lookouts, and a number of airfields were built to provide fast
access for fire control purposes. For many years the objective of the Forest Service was to
control all fires by 10 am on the day following their discovery.
Although Larry Garner was a great pack string and mule man in somewhat the old
tradition, he was a lot more than that. One of his best attributes from my perspective was
his ability to work with and teach the younger employees (and me also) some of his
backcountry tricks. Larry likely had forgotten more tricks about backcountry woodcraft
than most of us will ever know. On one pack trip the trail crew was camped at Crescent
Meadows when some little creatures of the night chewed the cinch strap in two for one of
the riding saddles. (The cinch strap, or latigo, goes under the horse's belly to keep the
saddle in place.) Larry came to the rescue and made a temporary replacement cinch
using a burlap sack that worked just fine until they got back to the station.
On another trip on the 19th of August with a wilderness specialist from the regional
office, we were en route between Big Creek and Chamberlain via Mosquito Ridge when
we were caught in a late summer snow storm. We managed to get the mules unpacked
and set up a couple of tents, but it just kept snowing and blowing. (Mosquito Ridge is
the high divide between the South Fork of the Salmon River and Chamberlain Basin.)
When it looked like this might become an all night affair, Larry had us put the saddles
back on the horses and mules, not only to provide a little warmth for the stock but also to
prevent having the sweaty pack pads and blankets freeze and get as stiff as boards and
difficult to handle the next morning.
When I think of Larry Garner, one of the first things that comes to my mind is the way he
ran the packing and camp cooking job for the trail maintenance crew. I'm going to
digress here again and provide a little run -down on the trail program for the Big Creek
District. As the district had very few roads, trails were, and probably still are, the
principal means of getting around. (When I moved into the ranger position, I inherited
one 3/4 ton pickup truck and 40 heads of pack & saddle stock.) We thought that there
were about 600 miles of trail on the district but, in truth, we really didn't know how many
miles we had. The standard means of determining trail mileage was to get a reading on
how long it took time -wise to cover a distance on horseback. That is, if it took about 8'/2
hours to ride from Big Creek to Chamberlain and the horse usually travelled at a rate of
3 %z miles an hour, then the distance must be about 30 miles. In my early days before
wilderness classification (most of the district was part of the old Idaho Primitive Area
that later became the basis for the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness), the
engineering department of the Forest Service was starting on a program of management
for the trail systems on all the national forests. First of all, they wanted an inventory of
all the trails on the district with accurate measurements of distances. Then each trail was
to be assigned a number and signs made for each trail junction providing mileage to each
destination accessed by that trail, very much like the highway system.
Now this was a big job as some of the trails were way out there on the far edges of the
district in really remote country. One of my long term goals as ranger was to hold on to
all the trails on the district, not so much for fire control purposes, as was the case with
their original construction, but more as a means of maintaining Forest Service jurisdiction
over these remote areas. I liked the idea that the Forest Service should establish and
maintain a presence in the backcountry, and this required laying down a lot of horse
tracks and quite a bit of backpacking and pounding the trails with hiking boots. I viewed
this as part of the Forest Service mission.
I took the direction from the engineering department seriously and started on a program
of accurately measuring trail distances by means of an odometer mounted on a bicycle
wheel that was to be pushed along each of the 600 miles of trail that we thought we had.
Pete Mourtsen did a lot of this work. Pete worked on the Big Creek District for seven
seasons in various capacities, starting on the fire crew and eventually moving up to being
the first wilderness ranger on the Payette National Forest. Pete has told me that one of
the primary reasons he returned to the District for multiple seasons was due to the great
individuals he got to work and learn from, not the least of which was Mr. Larry Garner.
Pete then went on to have a full career in the Forest Service, eventually retiring from the
Coconino NF in Arizona.
I believe that we eventually got all the trails on the district measured in this manner, and
we started on the signing part of the job in keeping with direction from the engineering
department. However, about this time the Wilderness Act was passed, and we started a
program of putting into practice wilderness management concepts that I have called
"getting the wilderness religion." This will have to be the subject of another write -up as
there is considerable on this matter that needs to be documented. However, it will suffice
to note here that the general direction for wilderness management is to lessen man's
activities on the land, and the engineering program of signing for the trail system on the
order of a little highway system was contrary to wilderness objectives. I believe that the
current direction is to keep signing to a bare minimum and encourage visitors to use a
map to find their way around as part of their wilderness experience.
Trail maintenance was a big part of the Forest Service work in the backcountry during
my days, and there were trail crews based out of all three Forest Service stations on the
district: Big Creek, Chamberlain and Cold Meadows. We were always open to new ideas
for "working trail" and tried several methods: Without going into detail and straying
further from Larry Garner, we tried backpacking crews, whereby the crew carried
everything: tent, sleeping bags, cooking utensils, groceries and tools to work with
tried crews outfitted with one packhorse and even one crew that used a couple of 1
to pack their camp gear. All these methods had one thing in common; we were very
weight conscious and strived to go lightweight and keep the amount of camping and
kitchen equipment, particularly groceries, down to a minimum. Consequently, these
crews used a lot of freeze dried, dehydrated, backpacking type foods, and cooking
consisted largely of heating water to reconstitute this stuff.
But this was not the way Larry Garner ran his trail crew. He was not the least bit
concerned about weight — "Hey, packing camp equipment and groceries -- that's what
those mules are for!" Larry didn't go for the dehydrated potatoes and other chicken -feed
like trail foods; he packed a full 100 pound sack of real Idaho potatoes and a slightly
smaller sack of onions. After all, that was only a side pack for one mule. As for the
kitchen cooking equipment, there was much more to cooking in Larry's camp then just
boiling water, so he didn't go for the light weight, backpacking type pots and pans.
Heavy cast iron - -- that's the ticket for serious camp cooking. He packed a large cast iron
griddle for the morning hot cakes and an oversized cast iron skillet for frying those spuds
and onions for the evening meal.
And he packed a Kimball stove in order to do some serious camp cooking. The Kimball
stove is sort of like a big brother to the much smaller, and more popular, sheepherder
stove. It is made of sheet metal, much like the sheepherder stove, but is much larger; the
cooking surface is approximately 15 inches wide by 30 inches long. This provides you
with a large fire box and you can really get this baby hot. The bottom is open so the stove
has to be placed on the bare ground when in use. Then there is an oven that is only
slightly smaller than the fire box and this fits on the back side of the unit. The oven,
again, is large enough to do some serious baking.
Larry's most notable claim to fame as a gourmet backcountry chef was that he was a
sourdough artist. I remember Larry telling a story of an experience he had while he was
in the outfitting business. One of his clients, a well -paid but over - worked CEO from a
big eastern city, arrived in hunting camp and announced that he suffered with a stomach
ulcer and would require a special diet. Larry fed him sourdough hot cakes, biscuits and
bread, and when he left at the end of his hunt ten days later, he told Larry that he had
never eaten so well nor felt so good in years.
Those of you who are familiar with sourdough know that the "starter" can be quite
fragile, and it requires considerable attention even in the environment of your home
kitchen so you will have some appreciation for what Larry was faced with in using
sourdough for one of the main staples of the daily menu for a trail crew in a highly
mobile camp setting. He was concerned that the "starter" not get too hot during the heat
of the day in mid - summer so he would put the sourdough crock in the creek to slow down
the fermentation reaction. Then during the night when the sourdough needed a little
warmth in order to work its magic, he would often take it to bed with him.
Larry started the day off by feeding the crew big stacks of sourdough hot cakes which is
almost standard practice for those cooking with sourdough. But the thing that I
remember most as being a little unusual was the square pan of sourdough rolls that he
turned out to go with the evening meal. I'm not sure how he made these tasty morsels
but they were a little larger than your fist, and I believe they were some what like
miniature loaves of bread. As I recall, he baked nine of these in a square pan and, as this
was an odd number for the three man crew plus Larry, there was always a debate as to
who got the extra roll. For sure, it was always devoured with relish. The crews just
loved to go out with Larry and eat his cooking. No freeze dried, Mountain House,
chicken -feed like fare for Larry Garner's trail crew! Thick slices of slab bacon, real eggs,
real potatoes, and fresh baked fare were always the first order of the day in Larry's camp!
The young fellows who were on Larry's crew were some of the happiest guys in the
Forest Service.
Larry passed away in 1985. Everyone who knew him had a great deal of respect and
admiration for the man, especially those of us who were privileged to have worked with
and learned from him in the Idaho backcountry.
I have been thinking about how to end this little tribute to someone that I thought so
highly of, and what keeps coming to mind is the last line in one of my favorite poems,
" Gunga Din" by Rudyard Kipling: "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!"
Earl Dodds (the last of the Big Creek Rangers) with a lot of help from Pete Mourtsen.
MIDDLE FORK LODGE GROM MAHONEY L.O.
Jim Porter Photo