How Behind The Scenes PAC Pressure Works

Don’t look for historic packstrings anymore on the PCNST. Nobody will be able to duplicate what our family enjoyed by recreating history. Here is what the Sierra Club pushed through. The heart beat rule. No more than six heart beats are allowed per party to go stretches up to 10-12 days between supply points. 

Say a couple (2), rode (2), and led (2). That “regulation” alone doesn’t outlaw horses. This does. Horses are required to carry their own pelletizied feed. The math on this is that it takes 20 pounds of alfalfa pellets, per horse, per day. A packhorse is actually not that efficient, capable of only carrying 200 pounds, if that.  At the altitude of this trail, built along the very crest of the Sierra/Cascade Ranges, 15-miles a day is about what a horse, or backpacker, can handle.  Even scorned frontiersman doing the math in his ugly-un-ivy-league-trained head comes to the conclusion that our 2,2,2 packtrain party has a PCNST range of a little over three days, or forty-five miles — at least a week short, unless a person is into animal abuse and starvation.

There also is a movement (good choice of words, that) to force day-tripping horses to wear diapers.  My bureaucratic style suggestion to all this —having earned the right to do so by plugging a brand new “pack it out” concept on national television— is that backpacker s should also collect their waste for disposal in an appropriate (truck supported) receptacle at trailheads. 

As a special interest forest user, handicapped by aging, I would also like to know why “they” can’t build a separate but equal replacement trail for historic horse use? Or why motorhome users wanting to camp, connected to nature, have seen the number of campsites available diminish of late, especially where campgrounds are being turned over for miss-management to the highest bidder? I also want to know, as a taxpayer, does the USFS plan on trying to re-coup the cost of the PSNST through backpacker user fees?

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