DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

Adventure! If only for an hour, a day, a week, adventure is good stuff. It makes us feel alive and takes the wrinkles out of life. Horse adventure can be powerful medicine. I have seen grown-ups perched with their horses on a mountain pass, eyes filled with tears, in awe of wild valleys and lonely mountain peaks that marched into the unknown.
As a kid I remember driving along a mountain road, somewhere near Grande Cache, Alberta. A pack string, primed and loaded, leaving the road, winding its way up a slope, heading into distant mountains. The sight cast a spell over me, beckoned me and sent shivers through me. It still does. A small event yet a defining moment.
Is there a sense of adventure in you? Even for an hour, a day, a week? If you have a horse or access to horses, then you should try it. Even if, ultimately, it is a one-time effort, you will learn something more about horses and much more about yourself. And you will have one more memory to carry around in your pocket. You do not have to be Davey Crockett or John Wayne to pull it off. Simply, you need to learn how to hang camping stuff on your pack or saddle horse. You do not necessarily require all the expensive gear and rigging used by outfitters. Keep in mind that outfitters have a long history and memory of details that allows them to pack many horses properly and keep things moving efficiently and safely. Your first horse packing trips with a one or two horses can be a learning experience and, like acquiring pack gear, it can be an act of progress. A sturdy riding saddle, a couple of duffel or hockey bags and a lash rope can do the trick.
The purpose of this article is to help readers become familiar with basic pack gear and hitches. Learning the details of each hitch is not difficult and can be learned through books, with experienced help, or from clinics.
To pack a horse, you need a pack pad, pack saddle (or a riding saddle rigged with back cinch and chest collar), pack boxes, bags, or manties, and a lash rope to secure the load. A pack pad is generally thicker, longer, and wider than a riding pad. This is because a bigger pad offers the horse more protection from the gear being packed on its back and because the dead weight of a load is harder on a horse than the weight of a live rider, who moves with the horse. If you do not have a pack pad, then you can still pack your horse with a quality riding pad. Just go easy on the weight and consider using two riding pads, about one to 1.5 – 2 inches thick total.
There are many types of pack saddles including the wooden sawbuck, Decker’s and modern, molded, plastic packsaddles. Regardless of the saddle type that you use, it is very important that a pack saddle fits the horse’s back like a glove. Many saddles are built for a variety of pack animals including narrow backed mules and wide backed Percherons. You need to be sure that the bare saddle fits the horse’s back. One method of fitting a packsaddle to the horse’s back is to sprinkle flour on the horse’s back then touch down the packsaddle in its proper position then sand or rasp down the places on the saddle bars that show white, until the entire surface of the bars show white when placed in the proper position. Most modern plastic saddles will allow some sanding or rasping. If you do not have a pack saddle, then you can use your riding saddle as a pack saddle. A sturdy built roper type with a back cinch and chest collar can work well. To see how to use the riding saddle as a packsaddle see Blue Creeks Trail/Packing book or DVD.
The gear that you hang on a horse is typically contained in pack boxes, pack bags, or a manty, which is simply gear laid out on a tarp and wrapped into a tight rectangular package. I have taken many trips, especially early in my career, where we carried our gear in army type duffel or hockey type duffel bags. A top tarp draped over your gear helps protect the bags and items on top of the load. Add a forty-foot lash rope (a rope with a cinch on one end) to wrap your package on your horse and you have what you need to go. Likely ninety percent of horse campers these days prefer to use pack boxes as opposed to bags or manties because they can take more abuse, they can be used as chairs and tables in camp, and they protect items very well. If you have only one horse you may choose to walk in, leading your saddle horse with your riding saddle packed with bags or boxes, get to your camp, set it up, and have your saddle horse to ride.
Gear is secured to the horse with hitches. There are two categories of hitches. One category hangs the gear on the saddle. This includes the popular basket and barrel hitch. The other category wraps the entire load to the horse’s body. In other words, the boxes, bags, manties or duffel that was hung on the saddle with a basket hitch, and maybe a tent or sleeping bag placed on top, is now wrapped tight around the barrel of the horse with a hitch from the second category of hitches, including the single diamond, one man diamond, double diamond, squaw hitch, ring hitch, etc.
The number of hitches is truly overwhelming. There are more than a dozen versions of the diamond hitch alone! But don’t be overwhelmed, you only need to know one diamond hitch and, if you choose, the barrel or basket hitch can be handy for hanging a variety of objects from your saddle. It needs to be very clear that the type of hitch you use is less important than being sure that the saddle fits properly, the load has proper weight, shape, and balance, and that your hitch of choice is tight and secure.
Most trail riders learn a hitch from someone who has used that hitch for years. The hitch has served them well and everyone is happy.
However, certain hitches do have advantages and disadvantages. For example, the one-man single diamond and the double diamond are easier to throw by oneself then the single diamond. The double diamond is user friendly for shorter people packing tall horses because one does not have to reach up top to tie a knot. We find that the standard single diamond is the most secure, most versatile, and fastest hitch with two people. In fact, it is the knot of choice for timed packing competitions. It’s fast, really fast. At our clinic, many guests who learn the hitch for the first time, after a half of an hour practice, commonly complete the hitch in under thirty seconds!
I first witnessed the single diamond hitch in the late sixties, as a 16-year-old, in the Yukon. I clearly recall our pack string of twenty-odd rough broken horses, draped with wool army blanket saddle pads, old wooden sawbuck pack saddles, canvas wall tents, and canvas top tarps, all wrapped up in single diamonds and heading into the Pelly mountains for 2 months of hunting adventures. But it was later, deep in the Northwest Territories, that the guides of NWT outfitters gave me a deeper appreciation for the single diamond. These guides are masters of their trade. Two of them packing a horse is a bit of magic, and poetry. Cowboys don’t do ballet; they do the diamond hitch. Perfect synchrony, and fast, in mere seconds. I have seen two packers pack six horses before another packer packed one and one-half horses by himself using the one-man single diamond. These guides are as brief with lingo as they are with time, ‘cummin atcha’, ‘yours’, ‘got it’, and then no need to talk for the rest of the day until bedtime, ‘g’night’ – maybe.
Like many guides, the NWT guides were perfectionists with their loads, and you should be too. Nothing was packed unless it was absolutely needed. Weights were kept down, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds on a big horse. On your first trips, keep the weight down, less than a hundred and twenty pounds for each horse allows for some error in poorly balanced loads or slipped loads. Less likely to sore your packed horse and less time and effort wasted spending time packing and unpacking items and food that you did not need.
The inherent design of the single diamond also makes it easy to keep tight as it is thrown, and it is the best hitch for odd, shaped loads. Finally, riders often talk about the time spent throwing hitches but forget that you need to untie the load and wrap up the lash rope when you get to camp. Most hitches require unraveling the rope like a snake in a tackle box but with the standard single diamond you only need to pull a couple of corners, unhook the lash cinch, and the whole hitch comes free. It takes only seconds. Wonderful, especially after a long day, in the dark, in the rain.
Although it is best to learn your hitches in person or at a clinic, learning out of a book also works. Two good books worth looking at are; Francis W. Davis’s Horse Packing in Pictures, and our book Blue Creek’s Trail Riding, Packing, and Training, as well as the DVD. The Blue Creek book can be found at www.vistapublishing.net as well as Blue Creeks Trail DVD.
Good luck with your camping adventure!

The standard single diamond thrown by two people is king, as opposed to the one-man single diamond. It is lightning fast to throw, under 1 minute for many packers, inherently tight as when it is quicky wrapped it is pulled tight at each stage, and great for odd shaped top loads like antlers. Doing it and watching it is the closest thing to poetry in motion that most crusty packers will ever know!

The double diamond do not need you to reach high to tie it off. Great for short people and tall horses. Pretty too! Go Oilers!

The packsaddle bars often need shaving to fit the packhorses back like a glove. For many years our rigging system was similar to most old-timers in the north, front cinch straight down and the back cinch back behind the gut. Now our preferred system is two cinches straight down and a crouper.