For packer Brash, the wilderness was home

Adding up the days, the way Gene Brash sees it, he’s spent a full two years of his life at Black Bear in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. About the same for Big Prairie.

Not a bad way to make a living, that’s for sure.

“How could you have any better time? No bosses. On the trail all the time. I was dedicated,” he said in an interview last week. “There couldn’t have been any more freedom.”

Brash, 86, was a packer for Glacier National Park early in his career in the 1960s and then a packer for the Forest Service in the Bob Marshall Wilderness from 1975 to 2000. Every week he made the haul into Big Prairie Ranger Station in the heart of the Bob, with his horse Rex and nine mules.

Rex was a good horse, Brash recalled. Rex was no particular breed.

“He was just a black horse,” Brash said.

He didn’t use a bridle.

“Just rode with a halter,” he said. “He always bucked a little. That didn’t hurt nothing. He knew me. I knew him.”

Seven hours a day in the saddle you get to know a horse. Going 3 miles per hour there was plenty of time to see the country. The days were often 10 hours long. But there is almost no prettier place on Earth than Big Prairie, Brash noted.

The key was to plan ahead and the horse would let you know if trouble was coming. Even with a long pack string, Brash would get off the trail if another party was coming. They were usually less experienced and it was easier that way. With grizzlies, you just waited.

“You’d stop,” he said. “He’d get it figured out and be gone. Never had any trouble.”

Brash didn’t have a dog. Didn’t want one.

“I liked to see the wildlife,” he said. A dog has a tendency to scare critters away.

The Brash family was also accomplished hunters. Gene and his father and brother were featured in the Hungry Horse News many times with game.

In one picture from 1963 they showed off what they bagged: three mountain goats, three mule deer and three elk — a five, six and seven-pointer.

“We’d fill up with goats and elk,” he said. “Every year (Mel Ruder) took our picture ... We lived on wild meat all our lives.”

Goats tasted pretty good, except for the shoulder meat, which was tough.

All those years in the saddle have kept him healthy.

“I haven’t got an ache or a pain,” he said.

But Brash has set aside his wilderness travels. Today he takes care of his lifelong companion, Gayle Smith, who just turned 99. They live in Hungry Horse and also have a spread in Cheney, Washington.