Author: Willard Wyman
Publisher: UNIVERSITY of OKLAHOMA PRESS, Sep 2005
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 0-8061-3697-9
Synopsis
A dramatic story of the great outdoors recounting the winding down of an old western craft - guiding mule trains. 6x9 inches, 368 pgs.
More Information
The packer?s business is guiding mule trains into mountains where wagons can?t travel. It?s a life of danger, long days, and low pay. But for those wedded to the wilderness and inaccessible high country, it is the only life there is.
During the Great Depression, young Ty Hardin is sent from his family?s failing Montana ranch to learn from the last of the great packers, Fenton Pardee, legendary in the Montana Rockies for his packing adventures across the Swan Range all the way to the Big Divide. High Country follows Ty through this apprenticeship and into World War II, where he watches trucks and jeeps replace the army?s mules. Wounded and shipped home, Ty recovers by packing into the Montana mountains he loves. After his mentor dies, Ty leaves Montana for the Sierra Nevada?the highest country of all?where he becomes a legend in his own right.
Writing in the tradition of Norman Maclean?s A River Runs Through It, Willard Wyman shares techniques of breaking and packing and leading animals into forbidding country, hunting and tracking, and making camp. Wyman brings you so close to the packer?s life you smell the leather, sweat, and oil.
Volume 15 in the Literature of the American West series.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Willard Wyman has been a wrangler, guide, and packer in Montana?s Bob Marshall Wilderness and the Sierra Nevada High Country for over forty years. He has taught literature and been a dean of students at both Stanford University and Colby College. He is Headmaster Emeritus of The Thacher School and presently resides in the coastal range of Northern California.
