The First Crew to Shoot Five Miles in One Day

                                                                    By Jon Horton

In 1979 I went to Alpine and asked the supposed manager of CGG crew 07, a bug-eyed Frenchman with radiant red hair named Alain Bedeau for a job. He sent me to the crew manager Lee Hurst, his mistress, and she hired me. He was a passive Frenchman who just signed the checks. She ran the crew and there was no doubt about who was the real boss.

We set out on a program that started out just west of Bondurant. That summer we would run east-west lines back and forth across the parallel Wyoming, Salt River and Caribou mountain ranges, working our way from north to south. It was a lot of very steep up-and-down almost every damn day and it wasn’t long before everyone was in real good shape from all the exercise.

After a couple of weeks I got on the powder crew, headed by Mike Muller and liked that a lot better than back crew. Mike was easy going and steady. We were always right where we were supposed to be, never behind and never too far ahead. The crew was paid a bonus of dollar a shot after thirty shots and we tried to make the crew at least ten dollars a day extra, riding the observer and pilots to keep up with us. Our crew almost always had the highest number of shots compared with the other CGG crews in the area, 22 and 05. Gary Lee was the shooter. We had a rep.

One of the crew quit, leaving Mike, Rory and me. The OB said he was sending us a good guy from Back named Leonard Bustillos. A few minutes later the chopper dropped off a bearded Latino guy who looked like he had muscles in his shit. He strutted up to us, nodded, dropped his pack on the ground where we were lying down and scoped out the mountain ridge up the line and nodded as if he liked what he saw. Then he started to strip his running pants, just as the radio squawked.

“Powder,” Mike said. We got up and watched as the chopper approached to start cache-ing the explosives. “Leonard, you do the banding,” Mike instructed and showed the new guy how to place the charge on the stake, run the P-cord over it and place the heavy rubber band. And off we went.

About an hour later we were in our hammocks at the top of the ridge when the radio squawked and the chopper was on its way with the third cache. We were rolling up our hammocks when we saw Leonard’s face appear, coming up the steep slope. His mouth was open, he was panting, sweat pouring down his face and drenching his shirt and the only color in his face was the sunburn. He raised a hand and tried to say something but just then the pilot dropped the first cache from the carousel and we were running off again, this time downhill. Leonard didn’t catch up to us until the very end of the day, though Mike did go back and check on him a couple of times, returning with a big grin on his face both times.

Later, Leonard told me, “I’d heard all about this hot powder crew and I wanted to get on it, wanted to be with the macho guys real bad. When I got out of the chopper I saw this lanky guy with glasses and a goofy grin, a short yuppie and an old man! I thought, ‘Well, fuck.’ Then the chopper came and Mike showed me how to put a rubber band on the charge. I took off my pants and put them in my pack, which took about thirty seconds, and when I looked up you guys were gone!”

Like I said, we were in real good shape from all the up and down and we’d been getting forty shots a day on average. Then one day we were on our third line, heading east and just topped the crest of the Wyoming Range. And there before us lay the most beautiful thing we had ever seen in our lives: fifteen miles of downhill then grass and sparse sagebrush flats! We looked at each other and grinned. We had a camp move coming up, which meant a three-day break so in the meantime we had time to plan. When we returned to work we had coordinated everything with the OB, the pilots and the mag guy. In fact, we’d gone to the mag the day before and sacked up every bit of powder in the mag.

At daybreak, as soon as it was legal to fly, the pilot was spotting powder and we were setting up shots. By the end of the day we’d shot just short of 250 of ‘em and made the crew a $212 bonus each. The next day we shot almost as many and ended up shooting the fifteen miles in three and a half days. Because it was a spec shoot the CGG management went nuts. What was worse for them, our sister crew, 05, was in similar terrain and they were shooting the shit out of things, too. When you have two 30-person crews knocking down $200/day bonuses each that’s over $100,000 in unanticipated costs. It was way cool. They stuck it to us every chance they got so it was payback time and we didn’t hesitate one bit.

I have two other very poignant memories of that season. One was when we were shooting our next-to-last line, another one that started off near Bondurant, over Grey’s River, through Star Valley and into Idaho. It was getting to be Fall and the trees were turning.  Must’ve been early October. We’d been in the mountains and hadn’t been making much in bonus, besides the new OB was slow and didn’t know how to sked the helicopters. We thought when we hit Star Valley we’d make some headway but the line ran right through the Thayne turd ranch and the head linesperson, Lady Day, actually had to wade out into the shit to replace the cables twice. Anyway, when we got up on top of the Caribou Range the next day we decided to make a run at another five mile day and end the line in style. We’d arranged with the pilots and the mag hag, Leonard’s old lady, to get things ready and we’d force feed the OB. We’d lay it out so he’d either have to shoot it, pick it up, or leave it out overnight and risk a beaucoup fine from the Forest Service. Fuck it, either way we’d be done with our part of the line and be gone on break.

Leonard had scored a bag of Jackson Brown, an organic mix of mescaline, rose hips and other herbs made in Wilson by a meadow muffin who lived on Fish Creek. It was mellow but kickass at the same time. Hard to explain. We each took a teaspoon full just as we walked by the doghouse and Mike leaned in and said to the OB, “Hang onto your ass.”

I was running stakes, using a camp axe with a cut-off handle that was heavy enough to usually drive a lath with one or two blows. I remember that pretty soon the head of the axe was leaving great swaths of blue light in the air as it flew down onto the lath. Things went quiet except for my running steps on the forest floor. We outpaced the helicopter and when we met at the end of each cache, we had to stand away from each another because of the force field we were in. Everything, especially the trees, were energized. When the next cache came Mike went first, spotting the charges, Leonard rolled cord and I went third, the fourth guy banded. We moved through the forest at a dead silent run, hopping trees, jumping creeks, brushing boughs aside, startling animals, running, dodging, then waiting for the chopper, driving more stakes, waiting again, running again, and then I finally broke out of the trees, after hours that took no time at all, and there was Mike and Leonard. And off to the side, Lady Day in her hammock.
The guy who was banding almost ran into the back of me.

She looked at the four of us, got out of her hammock and took it down. As she rolled it up and put it in her pack she said, “I can’t stand being around this much energy. You guys take the first ride, it’s on its way now.” And she walked around some deer brush and disappeared down the hill.

The flight from the terminus of the line back into Star Valley was one of the most memorable times of my life because of the heightened colors and emotions, the silent rotor blades turning slowly overhead—one of the most truly serene times of my life. I was in the back seat, looking down at the turning aspens of the Caribous, lime green and brilliant yellow mixed in with the deep green of the pines and then the gold of the barley fields of the valley. A flight of black, white, copper-colored geese were winging over the blue Salt River bordered by willows changing to red and yellow. We crossed the purple and yellow highway and pastures then flared over the mag site to land.

When we got out the pilot grinned at us and shook his head then took off, the gold and white Lama beating its way into the pale blue Autumn sky.

As we turned and walked toward the mag Leonard’s girlfriend came toward us, stopped and raised her hands to her face. Then tears began to run down her face, creating white channels in the dirt caused by all the hard work she had done, sacking all those shots.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re all so beautiful. You look like saints.”

* * *

After our break we swung the equipment a few miles away to the northwest and began to lay out a line that would run across the Snake River, cross the neck of Swan Valley below the Palisades Dam, run up the mountains near Palisades Lake and terminate on Mosquito Creek. Our sister crew 22 was running a parallel line in the opposite direction one mile to the west of us, beginning south of Victor and terminating on the other side of the Snake River. It was kind of slow going because the OBs had to take turns shooting so we wouldn’t step on each other.

It was late in the season now, and cold up high. Rocky, snowy, windy. We saw Mountain goats, I remember. And then one day there was a bunch of chatter on the radio and someone said an 22 chopper was down! We looked across the valley to the ridge where they were working and saw a plume of black smoke rising out of the trees. The doghouse wasn’t too far away so we hurried there and listened to the traffic. Our choppers took some of our guys to the scene and it didn’t take long to find out that the pilot and one other guy had been killed. Later we would find out it was Dave Kornya, the J.O., and pilot Tom Carter, both real good guys.

Apparently a set of phones had been caught when an equipment cache was dragged through a pine. Dave was going to shoot the branch loose with a shotgun as Tom hovered the chopper and something went very wrong. That’s the story I heard. Anyway, we finished our line and then moved onto the 22 line and shot it out. It was a sad line, to say the least, and when we on back crew were near the place where the wreck happened the wind blew the smell of burnt fuel and pine on us and it was wretched. The picture of me in Photos Four, the one in the orange T-shirt at the summit LZ on Mt. Baldy, was about a hundred yards from where 22’s front crew put up a six-foot tall cross when the accident happened.

 Two years later I flew with Floyd Kjerstad and Gary Lee to look at the cross that the 22 guys later put up on the crash site. It has a set of deer antlers mounted on it and I often wonder what hunters think when they see it in that remote place.