Instagram's Most Famous Mules - The New Yorker
I was in an ecstasy of mules. A mule named Charlie chomped on my notebook. A group of white mules, known for their bad attitude, kept their distance. A bony old mule named Maggie hung by a palomino colt named Ed. It was a sunny spring afternoon at the U. S. Forest Service’s Ninemile Remount Depot, in western Montana, where working horses and mules are bred, reared, trained, and wintered. Soon, rangers from districts across the Rocky Mountains would come to retrieve their pack animals for the summer season. ) I was stopping at the depot on my way to meet Chris Eyer, who once took a packing class here. Down the hill, by the corrals, a mule-driving class was just letting out. I asked one of the students, a ranger with five summers’ experience in the nearby Bob Marshall Wilderness, whether he had ever encountered Eyer. Not quite, but Eyer does have more than thirty-two thousand followers on Instagram. He and his mules—a full string of nine—live south of the depot, on twenty acres in the Bitterroot Valley, where a wooden sign proclaims his user name: “. ” (The sign was made by his fifteen-year-old daughter. ) Eyer spends most of the year working as an electrical contractor, but he volunteers as a packer for the Forest Service and various wilderness N. G. O. s in the summer. a portrait of Dulcinea, one of his mules. Source: www.newyorker.com
