Story by Ryan T. Bell / Photographs by Eliseo Miciú
It was a simple premise for a pack trip: deliver a friend to the bus station. But in the backcountry of Argentine Patagonia, even an everyday errand requires miles – and days – in the saddle.
“The teeth of a storm.” For the first time, I understood what that meant. Molar shaped clouds brewed over the mountain skyline, looking like the gullet of a terrible being about to eat us raw.
“This doesn’t look good,” Eliseo Miciú said.
He stowed his camera in a backpack he wore when shooting from the saddle. Next to him, my fiancée Madeleine rode huddled down in a poncho with the blanket’s fringe draped over her rein hand for warmth. A head wind blew us into a “V” formation, like a gaggle of Canada geese that didn’t get the memo about when to fly south.
Then again, we were already south. South of the equator, in South America, in southwestern Argentina. It’s a quizzical land to a northerner. Everything is reversed. Birds do fly north for the winter. The constellation Orion is flipped upside-down, looking like a skull-and-crossbones. And water swirls in a clock-wise direction when you flush the toilet. Scarry. If the hands on my wristwatch spun backwards, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But that’s the beauty of Argentina. It’s a loophole that allows horsemen to glimpse what life might’ve been like on the American frontier.
The Backpacker Guitar: A unique option for campfire entertainment.
It had been to Mount Everest and into space, but until we tried it out, the Backpacker Guitar hadn’t been on the back of a horse.
Last fall, while I was running errands in Bozeman, Montana, I walked past a house with a front porch crowded with guitar-playing Montana State University students. They sat on ratty couches circa Mork & Mindy, jamming to a never-ending Grateful Dead tune. One instrument in particular caught my eye, as it looked like a cross between a cricket mallet and a ukulele.
”It’s a Backpacker Guitar,” the player said, handing it over.
On the backstretch of a storied career, Western singer and horseman Ian Tyson learns that the last leg of a long circle can be the hardest to ride.
[Longview, Alberta - May 1, 2009]
The food at Longview Steakhouse isn’t what you’d expect to find in the Canadian Rockies. Driss Belmoufid, a Moroccan immigrant, opened the restaurant in 1994. The facade lacks the grandeur of a typical steakhouse (it looks like a flower shop), but walk inside and the aromas of turmeric and saffron clear the sinus of preconceived notions.
Ian Tyson has been “eating grub line” for two-weeks on a concert tour through Idaho and Wyoming. Now home in Alberta, he’s ready for a meal with some effort put into it and his choice of Longview Steakhouse is evidence of his knack for finding the West’s back alleys and underdog characters.
Story and Photographs by Ryan T. Bell
An emerging equine-science program has revitalized Montana State Universtiy’s college of agriculture.
When Montana State University was founded in 1893, horse-drawn wagons and saddle horses were the primary sources of transportation on campus. But the automobile age of the 1900s saw equines relegated off the streets, as “horsepower” came to refer to a combustion engine’s force. Today, horse power has returned to MSU’s campus in the form of an Equine Science program that is attracting a record number of students and helping to propel MSU’s College of Agriculture into the 21st Century.
Cowboy poetry isn’t all about dallied doggies and night-riding lamenters.
Listen close and you’ll hear odes to the diamond hitch, balanced pannier loads, and mule strings traversing the mountains. Here are three packer-poets who will perform this month at the 26th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, discussing how the backcountry has influenced their art.
One invention is turning the tide in the battle against noxious weeds in the backcountry.
With four canisters loaded onto his pack mule, Forest Service ranger Hal Pearce looks like he’s packing Pepsi into the backcountry. But actually, he’s hauling herbicide to spray noxious weeds in areas of the backcountry where ATV-mounted sprayers aren’t allowed. Pearce and fellow ranger Tom McClure co-invented the Saddle-Light, a secret weapon int he war on weeds.
Story by Ryan T. Bell / Photographs by Eliseo Miciú
Argentine gaucho Armando Deferrari explains how he and his fellow countryman Pablo Lozano brought their rawhide-braiding styles north and became two of the American West’s most unlikely traditional cowboy craftsmen.
The sound of cowboy boots walking across a concrete floor is what Argentine rawhide braider Armando Deferrari recalls about that July day in 2002. It was a day that would change the course of his career forever. Deferrari and fellow braider Pablo Lozano were showing their wares at the annual La Rural livestock exposition in Buenos Aires, Argentina, when an American cowboy approached their display.
2010: a year when the national parks backcountry will be forever changed.
Ken Burns' mini-series will put the spotlight on scenic vistas like the Snake River in Yellowstone National Park, encouraging more visitors to the area. Will the fallout be good or bad for horsemen?
In the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, a Coca-Cola bottle dropped from a passing airplane lands in a remote African village, irrevocably changing the tribesmen’s worldview. In just a few months, the U.S. National Park Service will drop three of its own Coke bottles (of sorts): concealed weapons, mountain bikes and Ken Burns’ movie camera. What will the ramifications be for horsemen?
