The Rescue of Belle and Sundance Read Free

read what they call “the packer’s bible.” Horses, Hitches and Rocky Trails , written by Joe Back in 1959, is a remarkable little 117-page book—remarkable not least for its detailed and often wry illustrations, its homespun wisdom and for the fact that its advice is still followed almost to the letter by outfitters more than fifty years later. If horses are sometimes dangerous, mountains are more so, and the combination of the two can be deadly. “The lack of two or three cave men tools
and a few simple precautions,” wrote Back, “can sometimes bring modern men to disaster and even death.”
    Leading pack horses in the mountains requires experience and a complicated set of skills. A simple omission, like forgetting to bring an axe to make a fire if need be, may prove fatal. You have to know your knots—the diamond hitch (single and double), the basket hitch, the half-hitched diamond. You have to know about saddles—the Decker, the sawbuck, the Spanish. You have to know about panniers (baskets slung on either side of the pack horse), slings and much else.
    And even if you were to pack a horse perfectly, with a keen eye for balance and weight, the job doesn’t end there. The breast collar has to be just so, so the load won’t shift backward when the horse goes uphill. As the horse loses weight from all this labour, the cinch loosens. Working also makes him thirsty, and when he fills up on water at every creek he passes (sometimes just so he can take a break), his belly expands, tightening the cinch again. Supreme vigilance and careful horsemanship are a must. “A horse gets to eat in his spare time, if any,” observed Back, “and if you push him beyond reason you walk home, and that poor devil ends up in a coyote or a can.”

    Belle and Sundance’s journey up Mount Renshaw began on September 12, 2008. Frank Mackay, a lawyer in Edmonton, some four hundred kilometres to the east as the crow flies, was bringing supplies to a friend who was hiking the Great Divide, which aligns pretty well with the B.C.–Alberta border. It seemed like a simple enough task for a man who had owned horses for a decade and who likely saw himself as a horseman. But things went wrong, very wrong, on that trip.
     

    The vast alpine area of Mount Renshaw.

    The sixty-three-year-old was riding his saddle horse, and leading Belle and Sundance, who dutifully carried their loads. Sundance was a fourteen-year-old gelding, a sorrel (a horse with a reddish brown coat and a mane and tail the same colour or flaxen); Belle was a three-year-old mare, a bay (dark brown in colour with black points—mane, tail, lower legs). This was Mackay’s first solo mountain expedition, and he quickly discovered the many challenges: on the way to Beaver Dam Pass, he got lost, veering east when he should have gone west. The weather, as it often does in the Canadian Rockies, turned foul and cold. And a brewing mutiny by his two pack horses finally erupted.
    What befell the group high in the alpine that day was not weather but unruly and rough terrain. Bog, to be precise. In previous years, crews had cut trees to widen a snowmobile trail, and all the deadfall lying in low and wet areas pinched and grabbed at the horses’ legs. The horses were soon exhausted, then stuck, and the man leading them struggled to extricate them. “It was like pickup sticks in there, with muskeg in between,” Mackay would later report. “This stuff was just muck.”
    Mackay had failed to heed one of Joe Back’s rules:
    On bad trails, across deep streams, bog holes, slide rock, and along canyon trails, it’s safer to
drive the pack horses loose, and let them pick their own way around bad and chancy sections. A lot of the time the pack animal shows far better judgement than the packer . . . two-legged fools rush in where four-legged angels fear to tread.
    Eventually, Mackay and his horses made it past the Renshaw warming cabin, where again the two pack horses got mired in