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Local Forest Service packer gets national award |
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Friday, 07 August 2009 |
By Wendilyn Grasseschi
Mammoth Times Staff Writer
 mammoth times photos/wendilyn grasseschi Just out of the backcountry after a week of work, a group of Student Conservation Association trail crew members watch Forest Service official Michael Morse load Baxter the mule with more than 100 pounds of water to take to backcountry fire fighters. Morse is the wilderness supervisor for the Mammoth Ranger District of the Inyo National Forest. He just won a presigious national award for his work showing how mules and horses can be used as a fire-fighting tool in wilderness areas.
But that was before he got notice last week that he was one of only a few people in 20 years to win a National Wilderness Award for his work using traditional stock packing techniques and primitive tools for fighting fire and building trails in the backcountry.
Although once the Forest Service did most of its backcountry work using stock animals, the use of horses and mules has declined to almost nothing in recent decades, especially following the advent of the helicopter as a fire-fighting tool.
But that might be about to change and if it does, it may be due in no small part to Morse, the wilderness supervisor for the Mammoth Ranger District of the Inyo National Forest.
In fact, according to the award letter sent out from Washington to Morse, he has done nothing less than “initiate new thinking about the importance of traditional skills in the agency.”
Among other things, this means that stock animals might be used much more often to pack in fire crews and fire suppression gear to a remote location once thought only accessible by expensive and noisy helicopters.
And the award may be just the beginning for Morse and his mules, according to Forest Service official Jeff Marsolais, the man who nominated Morse for the award.
“What we are really hoping to do is turn this area into a ‘Center for Excellence’ that will be a regional center for training the next generation of wilderness professionals and leaders,” the Bishop-based recreation and wilderness officer for the Inyo National Forest said Thursday.
Though that dream is still a dream, it got a huge boost this week with the award, Marsolais said.
“Everyone likes success stories and Michael has had a lot of success stories,” he said. “And we have all the skills here on the Inyo, excellent packers, skilled trail crew leaders, preofessional wilderness managers, everything we need to be able to pass these techniques on down to the next generation.”
Morse himself is not the kind of man who likes to draw attention to himself – except when it might mean keeping intact what he believes is the true spirit of the wilderness he has loved since a teenager.
“A mule costs one-tenth of what a helicopter costs, a mule is not noisy, mules are smart and strong and hard-working and they are a huge part of the history of wilderness in the Forest Service,” he recently told a young group of the Student Conservation Association just back from a week in the backcountry.
“Part of the wilderness experience is the quiet, a place “untrammeled by man” as the Wilderness Act states,” he said. “That means quiet. And, as a wilderness manager, my job is also to use tools wisely, use anything that makes less of an impact to the ecosystem.”
That means mules as well as traditional hand tools, like a cross-cut saw instead of a chain saw, or a hand-held drill bit and a sledge hammer instead of a jack-hammer.
“When a couple of us packers sat down five years ago and looked around the room at each other, we realized that with all the retirements, with the budget cuts, we were about to lose, maybe forever, the skills it took to do work in the backcountry without machines,” he said.
So Morse got to work and over time, he and his mules started travelling the state, showing other forests just what a man and a mule can do. Though it took time, his persistence paid off. By 2008, he found himself spending six days a week for more than a month helping the Big Sur-area wilderness recover from the huge fires that burned more than 200,000 acres there last year.
“That was our big break,” he said. “People didn’t think mules could do that kind of work.”
“They were surprised and impressed.”
The award “ humbled him,” he said.
“I got pretty choked up.”
It’s not something anyone could do alone, he said.
“There are so many people here on the Inyo behind this, like Lee Roeser, my main packer for the past nine years, Jeff (Marsolais), Jon Regelbrugge and more. Without them, this could not have happened.”
“Michael is a man who belongs in the wilderness,” said Roeser. “He works hard, his work is impeccable, his enthusiasm is infectious. It makes you want to be around him and it’s getting passed down to a whole new generation.”
And what Morse doesn’t accomplish, the mules just might.
Before he met Baxter the mule, Student Conservation Association crew member Alan Lee, 16, had never met a mule. Now the Oakland native feeds the mules out at the Forest Service pack station on the Sherwin Creek Road “every chance I get.”
“At first I thought they would be like a donkey and kick every chance they could but I learned that they’re big but they’re gentle,” he said.
“And just like us, they have to work every day.”
And just like the mules, Lee might be back again next year – and just maybe, as Morse hopes, the next and the next and the next as well.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 14 August 2009 )
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