Diamonds on the trail.

This article discusses mule-packing and its history.Meet the mule-packer. A hard man from the distant past has found his last redoubt in the craggiest pockets of the Sierra Nevada--the upturned "snowy sawblade" that separates California& x2019; s coastal valleys from the western cattle lands.Today’s packer is a mountain man, and he lives to pack. That means packing cargo into evenly weighted loads, heaving these packs on to the backs of animals, then tying them down with a" diamond hitch" and riding up a trail with a single-file pack train in tow.To take full advantage of natural four-legged locomotion, the packer must trust a beast’s back with a cargo of dead weight. The packer and his animal were once needed to cross rugged country of any kind. The main ingredients of the modern mule train first coalesced in medieval Spain, with the addition of yet another far-flung influence.