THE LEGEND OF TROY
Troy Patton wears a white cattleman’s hat. The color matches his Ford Super Duty, parked, as he promised it would be, at the corner of one of Lone Pine’s lonely stoplights—a banner of civility hanging over a town that has come to define, in many ways, our image of the wild, wild, American West.
Well, Hollywood’s image of the American West.
Patton is a man at home in his landscape. Around us, there are posters hung advertising the Lone Pine Film Festival, and teenagers stamp lawn signs into the dirt which promise a weekend “Where the Real West Becomes the Reel West.” Patton—a horseman first, but a talented historian second—directs my attention to the Merry-Go-Round. A carousel-shaped restaurant that once served John Wayne after his days spent shooting The Oregon Trail (1959) and How the West Was Won (1962), and now serves an excellent Chinese buffet.
“There,” says Patton, pointing to the Mt. Whitney Restaurant across the street, “is a signed portrait of Clark Gable.”
Patton, himself, looks like a figure in a Western. If you didn’t know any better—if you couldn’t see the halo of flies circling his coffee in cold pursuit of sugar—you might mistake the cup he’s holding for a can’o’beans storytelling scepter from the films of old.
He’s also something of a local celebrity in his own right. Hardly a sentence is exchanged between us absent the punctuation of a friendly car horn, passing by our table outside the Totem Cafe. Patton waves back at each one. The coffee is free, because Patton and his wife, Susie, are regulars.
Olga, a waitress that is not our own, arrives part way into my conversation with Patton. She has baked a pan de muerto in advance of the celebration, and insists that Patton has a piece of it. They talk of their families, both back in Long Beach.
“That’s the hardest working girl I know,” says Patton, when Olga leaves. And from him, that’s no small endorsement.
He’s got a trophy buckle, too, around his waist. A relic of his calf-roping days on the rodeo circuit. The belt is engraved with the image of a young cowboy. Engraved, also, within the fleurets of pewter is the date 1985.
Patton contends that he is “no spring chicken.”
But he is many other things, besides.
Patton is a foremost expert on how to throw a diamond hitch on the flank of a pack animal to balance the load just right. He is often a man, on one end or the other, of a two man tuttle-tooth saw. And he is a longtime member of the Backcountry Horsemen of California. Vice President of Public Lands, and member of the Eastern Sierra Unit.
The Back Country Horsemen of America (BCHA) is an all-volunteer organization, with chapters located in 32 of the 50 states. The members of those chapters are riders of a particular sort—horsemen that Patton refers to as packers.
And if that word conjures images of saddle-bag slung mules and horses given humpback silhouettes from water jugs and sleeping rolls, you aren’t far off. The modern packer is in a class with those most ardent of outdoorsmen. Among them, he is probably the most equipped.
Patton got into recreational packing for the same reason most men and women do.
“You can take a big bed, your dogs. Eat real well. The hikers walk by—who won’t even pack a toothbrush to save weight—see us having a cold beer, and walk away with their tongues hanging out of their mouths.”
Packers, of course, ride pack stock—horses and mules are those most frequently used in high desert country. The pack animal is one that boasts a long partnership with the United States Forest Service and the maintenance of the country’s public lands. After all, it can distribute a load far better on four feet than we can on two. It can traverse the most precarious of roads and access ways on which four wheel, three ton vehicles are prohibited or incapable of negotiating, altogether.
Think about it this way, as Patton implores us to:
“Say the Forest Service gets called out on a fire. They get an inversion layer from that fire that holds the smoke down. But they still need their pumps, their fire hoses, their groceries. They need water. But the helicopters can’t fly, because they can’t see down through the inversion layer.”
Pack stock, as it turns out, is a mainstay of supply delivery during events of wildfire suppression. And if that seems primitive, Patton’s response is simple: “So is fighting fire.”
Beyond that, if you’ve hiked or cycled through any of the hundreds of miles of public land that run within the inventory of the Pacific Crest Trail network, or alongside it, you’ve probably encountered the Backcountry Horsemen’s handiwork. A fallen tree encountered on a trail, and sawed through its 3-foot diameter in a manner just so as to make that trail traversable, was not, Patton regrets to inform us, an object of divine intervention. More likely, the clearing of that land for public enjoyment was the work of the Backcountry Horsemen of California. It may have been any one of the 22 units that dot the state, from the Santa Ana River to the North Bay. It may have been Patton, himself.
And it wasn’t some old hack job, either. Education is a key tenet of the Horsemen ideology—volunteers enroll in “Saw School,” and are well-versed in the legal authorities and objectives of the Forest Service Manual (FSM).
The dissemination of that knowledge, too, is essential. The Backcountry Horsemen work with youth groups throughout the state—many of which come from underrepresented communities—to ensure that not only is land preserved for future generations, but that it is preserved alongside a spirit of stewardship instilled in young people.
Patton takes pride in the five-year old-he taught to throw hitches. He laughs in thinking about the two twin boys he was showing how to ride, but kept forgetting to which he’d taught what.
“Many of these kids have never touched an animal before in their life, but here they are,” says Patton. “So it’s all about education.”
Patton, and the men and women he rides and teaches with, are wardens of sustainable land management at its most fundamental. Maintenance today, after all, is worth a hill of beans unless it begets maintenance tomorrow.
And Patton would have it no other way. In his words, “it’s always been horses.”
Some background on Troy Patton, the horseman: His father was a roughrider. His mother rode for a drill team in her own rodeo heyday. And in Patton’s native Long Beach, horsemen have somewhat of a surprising place in the city’s history.
“Long Beach used to be seven miles long—seven and a half,” says Patton. “That’s why it got its name. During World War II, the Long Beach Mounted Guard rode Long Beach 24-7, horseback, looking for the Japanese invasion.”
After Patton was drafted at the age of 19, and served his own stint in the US army, he traded the saddles of his youth for crane cabs. He retired from that work after 38 years, and in 2006, moved up to Lone Pine with Susie—herself, Secretary of the BCHA Executive Committee.
Some background on Troy Patton, the family man: The Pattons had been making the trek up from Long Beach to the Eastern Sierra for some 20 years before their son settled down in Lone Pine, and Patton had his first granddaughter. And at the behest of Mrs. Patton, Lone Pine was where the two would remain.
“There isn’t enough high explosive in the country to blow my wife out of the California air.”
As a lifetime resident of the state, Patton has borne witness to the ways in which it is changing. Lone Pine, after all, is one of the most beloved stops for hikers along the Pacific Crest Trail. From our vantage point on South Main Street, we watch dozens of them mill in and out of the restaurants, or unload their packs at the hostel across the road.
But recreational land use in the state is facing competing, and often contradictory, priorities. There’s the pressure to open up more trails to motorbike use, for example. But this would require taking older trails out of inventory to cater to the needs of motorbikers, hikers, and horsemen alike—those, which were initially sequestered to back inventory because according to Patton, the Forest Service had more trails open than they could maintain.
The Backcountry Horsemen’s task, then, is to help the Forest Service when they can, and to clear and maintain trails. But specifically, it is to maintain them in such a way that all recreational users enjoy equal access. Leveling berms created by motorists, for example, to the advantage of hikers, but widening tight corners where they can to the advantage of motorists.
According to Patton, it’s that call to action that has inspired many of the Backcountry Horseman—which, being volunteer-based, is something of an eclectic cohort. There’s the former police officer from Clovis, who works with ex-convicts on the trail. There’s Dr. Carter, the retired eye doctor down in Bishop who drives clear to San Diego for his meetings.
“He didn’t have a very physical job as an optometrist,” said Patton. “So he craved it, you know?”
Cold beer aside, volunteer firefighting and the elbow grease required to hand-saw through a redwood’s trunk (power tools, it should be noted, are prohibited in National Forest Wilderness, as designated by the USFS) are not the common man’s idea of a restful retirement. And there is that tendency, when we see men and women who are active in their retirement, to think of them as some kind of anomaly—some harborer of that rare mutation in which work is misconstrued as play. To be clear, Patton is not that man.
“Oh, it’s work. Sometimes, more than that,” says Patton. “But work is not a dirty, 4-letter word.”
For Patton, then, it’s the work that pushes him on. If he’s the object of any fortunate permutation, it’s endurance—a willingness to fight for the thing that he kept repeating throughout our conversation: “Public lands have always belonged to everybody.” But there’s an understanding of precariousness in the way he says it. They always have, sure. But without stewardship, nothing and no one guarantees that their accessibility will continue.
And the question of that accessibility pulls taut the tension held between the preservationist and conservationist schools of thought.
What do you think your organization advocates for? Is it preservation or conservation?
Both.
How so?
When we work with the Forest Service, they’re pretty much designated to conserve everything. The Forest Service utilizes the resources and the timber and the mining. Water. Things like that.
But we’re also looking at it from the standpoint of Okay, if I dig up this rock, and roll it down the hill, what happens? It was helping to hold that hill up. And we want to preserve it for somebody else, as it was.
Right.
Because a lot of people don’t realize that what I do up here, shouldn’t infringe on what you’re doing up here. That’s preservation. If I take off, and figure I’m going up into the mountains to get up into some peace and quiet, and somebody pulls into the camp next to me with their boombox, smoking a funny cigarette blowing my way, we lose the respect there.
So we’re doing both, [preservation, and conservation]. That isn’t easy.
***
Patton has the kind of long-distance vision that only comes to those who first have a firm grip on the past.
“There used to be this idea,” he remembers, “when they passed the Wilderness Act in ‘64. The idea that there was this place you could go … that unless an airplane flew over, you could get an idea of what the world looked like 100 years ago. Of course, now 100 years ago, they were flying planes.”
Planes, ironically, had been flying above us all afternoon. And Patton—ever the historian—has an explanation for them.
“They fly from the China Lake Naval Weapon Center,” he explains, of the aircraft. “The pilots come through the mountains to learn how to navigate and dodge radar… They come down over my house so low, you barely miss the pilot’s face.”
And to the horseman, it’s a marvel.
He has a friend, he says—a man called Lloyd and now a Horseman, too—that once flew out of China Lake. He had grown up flying planes, as Patton had grown up riding horses, and flew his father’s airplane out of the alfalfa fields they grew on their farm in rural California.
“But now they grow almonds. The last I saw, they grew almonds,” says Patton, and both of us watch as the plane flies past.
“You have to rotate the crops, to keep the soil changing,” he explains, as his final lesson in sustainability for the afternoon.
Over the last of our coffee, Patton suggests we drive down, caravan-style, to a viewpoint in which the Cerro Gordo Mines can be seen, if for no other reason than it’s a piece of California’s history and because it’s beautiful.
We leave the Totem Cafe, and I follow Patton through town, past more advertisements for the festival, and past the Merry-Go-Round.
Patton pulls off on a shoulder of US 395 that overlooks Owens Lake—a lake which, until this year, had not seen water since 1969. Patton points to a stretch between the mountains, behind it.
He points to the town of Keeler, population 71, that is nestled beneath that stretch. Patton calls it the saddle point—the lowest dip along the ridge, between two larger peaks. He describes the steamboats that used to cross this lake, before they met covered wagons on the other side to bring the Cerro Gordo silver down further to the smelters of San Bernardino. And then he points to the direction of his own home, further down the highway, to make sense of the place.
As much as any of it, Patton is a fixture in his landscape. He is unwitting to the fact, or so it seems, that he reminds of that which Gable and Wayne stood for. Those defenders of the West. Defenders of Good. And in the American imagination, these have always meant much the same thing.
I am not sure if Gable knew how to throw a diamond hitch. Or Wayne, for that matter. And I do not know if it dawned on them that the preservation of the West they loved is a thing, inherited—that they would have to teach the generation that followed, about diamond hitches and everything else, in a way that really mattered.
And so for that, thank God for a man like Patton.
