Those Marvelous Grand Canyon Mules

Those Marvelous Mules

Ron Clayton is a twangy, twinkly eyed man who bears the title of livery manager for the Fred Harvey Transportation Co. That's one way of saying he's the top mule wrangler at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Most mornings, Clayton can be found clad in jeans, Stetson, and chaps, working with his muleteers to get the animals ready for the trek to the bottom of the Canyon and then matching mule to tourist in the corral near Bright Angel Lodge. What makes Clayton a star of the show, though, isn't so much his ability to handle animals. It's his speechmaking: full of fatherly good sense, cowboy-type whimsy, and tough reality. Hear him as he addresses our group of riders.

"Folks," says Clayton, "this is a hard trip. It's not for everybody. If you're scared to death, get out of here. If you're a little apprehensive, you're in great company so is everybody else. If you quit now, you'll get your money back. If you go 10 feet down that trail, I'm going to keep your money just for the aggravation you caused me." Clayton gives a nearby mule a friendly slap on the rump and continues.

"You gotta do something besides sit in the seat and look out the window. We stress two things. Number one is your safety. Number two is having a good time. And a good, tight, compact group is 95 percent of the safety of this trip. You leave 25 to 30 feet between you and the mule in front of you, that's 25 to 30 feet your mule can and will run to catch up. Pretty soon we can't see you; we can't see behind you; we can't hear you; we don't have any idea what's goin' on back there. Folks, I tell you up front, we don't have time for that. I'd rather make you mad.... I'd rather spoil your vacation than get somebody hurt today." He goes on. "We give you a little switch. You use that switch right where your daddy did and with the same authority your daddy did, to make these mules stay three to five feet behind the mule in front of them. Please keep in mind these mules are going into that Canyon today because you want to go, not because they want to go. They've been there."

Then, as if to apologize for the rather austere flavor of his lecture, Clayton winds up with an amiable: "We'll try to show you a trip you'll never forget." And he does exactly that he and his trail guides and their wonderful, stoical, miraculously surefooted mules. It's a trip that Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite immortalized. It's a trip that more than a half-million people have taken since that first Canyon ride for visitors began nearly a century ago.

Actually, there are four trips. There's a one-day trip half-way down the Canyon from the South Rim to Plateau Point, at the tip of the Tonto Plateau, from which you get an eye-popping view of the Colorado River far below. There's a twoday trip to the very bottom, to the river itself, with an overnight stay at historic Phantom Ranch, the "deepest down ranch in the world." ("Let Hitler try and find us here," wrote a visitor in the guest book during World War II.) And the North Rim has half-day and full-day rides from May through mid-October. South Rim mule trips are year-round. Dan J. Cole, Jr., the Fred Harvey director of transportation, says it's quite a thing when you ride down to Phantom Ranch in midwinter. You leave a snowy South Rim all bundled up, and, when you get to the bottom, you see spring wildflowers blooming and do some sunning on a beach on the Colorado. One does, after all, drop through six climatic belts from rim to river.

And oh, those marvelous mules! The South Rim keeps about 145 of the celebrated "long-eared taxis" in its remuda - 115 or so for tourists, the rest for packing supplies to Phantom Ranch. (There's no other way to the bottom except hiking and helicoptering, and the latter is frowned upon.) Ron Clayton gets most of his mules from Tennessee specifically, from an outfit called Reese Bros. "Rufus Reese is a thirdgeneration mule trader and the biggest in that part of the country," says Clayton. "He handpicks these mules for me. And he guarantees them. If one doesn't work out, he sends me another one." Why mules instead of horses? They're tougher, insists Clayton. They stand the heat better. (It rises above 100° F. along the Colorado in the summer.) They're clannish they like to stay together. And mules are, by and large, smarter than horses. They know how to take care of themselves and those on top of them. The story is told about a woman rider who fainted on her mule somewhere along the trail. The mule stopped, spread its legs, and held its head up so the unconscious woman could lie on it without falling off until the wrangler came to the rescue. And, most importantly, the mules are surefooted. That, of course, is the be-all and end-all of negotiating those famous switchbacks that zigzag along the Canyon walls like the lines on a seismographic chart. I remember coming back from Phantom Ranch up the South Kaibab Trail. It's the kind of trail that author Irvin S. Cobb described as "steeper than a ship's ladder but not quite so steep perhaps as a board fence." We passed a hiker, standing still, as he was supposed to (mules have the right-of-way), with his back to the Canyon wall. "Perfect feet," I heard the hiker say admiringly. "They have absolutely perfect feet." The mule you draw at the corral the morning of your ride will have been trained as a pack animal. He plods those trails with things on his back instead of people for a year or so before novice riders are entrusted to him. Some mules never advance to carrying passengers. "They just never get used to the backpackers on the trail," says Doug Avila, a wrangler with our party. "A mule's just like a kid. Some of 'em grow up; some don't." Stubborn? Well, yes, or so tradition has it. Yet one authority on the breed has written that it's not stubbornness exactly "he's just too smart to let you con him into something he doesn't want to do." I liked what John Loomis in our party had to say on the subject of mules in general and the Grand Canyon mule trip in particular. "Where else in the world can you pay good money to have a mule make a jackass out of you?" What it all seems to come down to, in dealing with mules, is being at least a little smarter and more stubborn than the mule. Ron Clayton likes to tell of the time when a mule carrying a woman tourist on the Phantom Ranch trip balked at going through one of the two tunnels on the Bright Angel Trail. The woman, it seems, just couldn't handle her animal. "C'mon, ma'am," the wrangler called back from the front of the string. "Whack that mule! Show him who's boss!" But she couldn't bring herself to do it. Behind her rode an older man who looked like a tenderfoot, the quintessential city person, even, perhaps, a jet-setter fancy clothes, gold chain, that sort of thing. "Why don't you let this lady and me trade mules?" he asked the wrangler. The latter agreed.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) The mule train negotiates the narrow Bright Angel Trail. Riders are rewarded for their bravery with eye-popping views of the Canyon.

Marvelous Mules

agreed. The jet-setter approached the woman's mule, seized the reins, and unleashed a torrent of cusswords in which could be detected the evidence of a Southern accent. Then he mounted the mule and whacked it soundly across its flank, whereupon the mule, looking thoroughly intimidated, pranced right through the tunnel. Turned out the gentleman, before he hit it rich, had grown up on a farm and ridden mules as a kid. It's only fair to the mules, incidentally, to note that certain things are demanded not only of them but of the folks who ride them. You must be at least 4-feet-7-inches tall. You have to be in reasonably good health. (The trip is strenuous, especially for untrained riders and the out-of-shape.) You must be able to speak and understand English, so you'll know what the wrangler/guides are saying along the trail. (Dan Cole says a party of 30 German tourists had to be turned down because German was all each person could speak.) You must weigh no more than 200 pounds. (An old Canyon hand remembers the anxious night before he was scheduled to go on his ride. He spent the entire night running around the South Rim and turned up the next morning in shorts, T-shirt, and thongs and weighed in at just under 200!) Then, after you've gone to all the trouble of meeting the reasonable requisites for going on the mule ride, there's the rigor of the ride itself. When I finally got back to the top of the South Kaibab Trail around noon of the second day, the muscles along the insides of my thighs and calves, from being stretched for two days across the broad back of old Jumper, were a mass of hurt. "I feel fine except when I sit down, get up, or walk," one of my fellow tenderfeet was heard to say. And from another: "It has to be the grandest place in the world in which to experience pain."

But the rewards for your endurance are truly abundant. You can send a postcard from Phantom Ranch with what just might be the quaintest postmark anywhere: "Mailed by mule at the bottom of the Grand Canyon." But mostly, you get a perspective of the Grand Canyon from the inside that you cannot get from either rim. It finally becomes comprehensible. You can grasp it. You see some of its components close up: Buckey O'Neill Butte and Indian Garden and Battleship Rock. The towering black walls of the Inner Gorge composed of Vishnu schist, which is two billion years old half the age of the Earth itself. Truly, wrote Cobb, the Grand Canyon "is even more wonderful when viewed from within than it is when viewed from without."

Scary? Yes, sometimes. Engineer Robert Brewster Stanton, in the 1890s account of his expedition down the Colorado, called it the "most stupendous chasm on the globe." During any one of many pauses in your slow, deliberate progression into the chasm, as the mule string stops and the well-trained animals turn and face into the Canyon, you peer down into seemingly bottomless space. Yet, at the same time, distances within the Canyon become almost measurable staggeringly so. You look across from one cliffside to another, and you see another string and its riders working their way up the switchbacks over there, looking for all the world like a line of ants. You can peer up from the bottom and see the tops of the colossal buttes and

Marvelous Mules

monuments and promontories and spires that comprise so much of the Canyon's grandeur.

"The Grand Canyon," wrote the English author J. B. Priestly, "is a sort of landscape Day of Judgment. It is not a showplace, a beauty spot, but a revelation."

And it only reveals itself, fully and finally, when on foot or astride one of those obstinate, unattractive, utterly dependable "long-eared taxis" you've gone all the way to the bottom of it.

Author's note: For South Rim mule trip information, rates, and reservations, write: Fred Harvey Inc., Reservations Department, P.O. Box 699, Grand Canyon, AZ 86023; phone: (602) 638-2401. North Rim: Grand Canyon Trail Rides, P.O. Box 128, Tropic, UT 84776; phone: (801) 679-8665 from October 23 through May 14 or (602) 638-2292 during the remainder of the year.

Joseph Stocker has been writing about Arizona and other topics for magazines across the nation for 40 years. James Tallon's distinguished photograpby career bas included three decades of contributions to Arizona Highways.

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