#Whites mule packer free

“Without the mules, who knows what Glacier would look like?” “Every packer here recognizes that this is the historical way of doing things,” she said. In Glacier, a wild chunk of pristine country that remains one of the largest intact ecosystems in the lower 48 states, Michalak said the importance of maintaining the park’s natural integrity is impressed upon almost anyone who visits, but especially the packers. “There are so many women who have left their mark on packing,” Michalak said. While working as a packer in Olympic National Park, Michalak learned about the legacy of Minnie Peterson, the famed packer who pioneered trails throughout the high Olympic wilderness, living off the land and working for over 50 years as a guide, once leading President John F. In Mongolia, she worked as a packer with Cossack golden eagle hunters, and in Australia she packed in the Snowy Mountains, the highest mountain range on the mainland continent. “To be able to use my packing skills to help people was just so rewarding.” “That was a phenomenal experience,” Michalak said.

#Whites mule packer free

Known as the Free Burma Rangers, the aid group relies on pack strings to deliver medicine, supplies and humanitarian support in regions where other aid organizations cannot go.

Impressed with her savvy, Eubank invited Michalak to come work for his volunteer services organization in Myanmar (formerly Burma). When Michalak’s mules bolted and broke loose, Eubank helped the young packer wrangle them back in line. Army Special Forces operative named Dave Eubank. While packing on the Hoh River Trail in Olympic National Park, for example, Michalak met an ex-U.S. She learned to pack working for an outfitter in Alaska, and put herself through college at the University of Alaska Fairbanks while packing across the western United States, working for outfitters spanning the High Sierras to Mount Whitney, tracking along the Pacific Crest Trail on week-long trips and opening a portal that revealed packing opportunities across the globe. She’s just excellent, with a lot of experience and a lot of energy.”īorn in the cityscape of Los Angeles, Michalak began riding horses at age 5, after her father, a military man, moved the family to the U.S. “We hired two young people this summer, including Jill, and we got really lucky. “We’ve got packers here who are 65 years old and packers who are 27,” Glacier’s lead packer Dave Elwood said. Mules are perfect for hauling such heavy gear in and out of the park’s vast backcountry.Īnd while Michalak happens to be Glacier’s first female packer, the park is just the most recent stint in a dizzying packing resume that crisscrosses the world. That means using handsaws to clear deadfall from trails, block-and-tackle pulley rigs to lift bridge timbers and spud bars to pry rocks out of trail treads. “In a lot of ways, the mules preserve the park and keep it going in the direction it’s meant to go,” Michalak said recently on a smoky afternoon at the park’s pack barn near West Glacier, a mule-dominated museum of packing history.Īlthough Glacier National Park lands are not federally designated wilderness, they are managed as wilderness per National Park Service policy, meaning the park must employ the least invasive, non-mechanized methods possible when any kind of human management is deemed essential at all. In places where wide expanses of wilderness have been set aside, the primitive skills that a good mule packer offers are invaluable, a sentiment that rings especially true in Glacier National Park, where 95 percent of its more than one million acres are managed as wilderness, flanked by the trappings of a mechanized world. Packing is an ancient art and trade rooted in tradition, and while Jill Michalak subscribes to its customs with the utmost deference, she’s bucking convention at Glacier National Park, where this season she landed a job as the first female packer in the program’s century-old history.