My wife, Katy, and I recently fulfilled a long-planned-for goal of visiting Grand Canyon National Park, which is remarkable. More on that later.
I had scheduled an interview with a mule wrangler for the second day of our visit. I was directed to the park’s livery barn, which is where the mules used to haul gear and visitors to and from Phantom Ranch—a century-old outpost in the canyon basement on the Colorado River—are kept and cared for.
We arrived early. The man I was scheduled to meet, Mr. Berry, was not yet available. We were invited to wait. The barn, a large wooden building, was clean and well-kept but carried the distinctive scent of the critters it housed. “You’ll smell it before you see it,” a park employee cheerily told me when I asked for directions.
After a short wait, Sophia Nasato, a slim young woman dressed in cowboy work garb and sporting a wide-brimmed hat, led a string of mules through the open barn door. She dismounted and asked if she could help us. Introductions were exchanged. I explained that I was waiting for a mule wrangler.
“I’m a mule wrangler,” she said.
National Park employees are unfailingly polite. Sophia began unloading one of her mules while chatting with us.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“Kentucky.”
She looked up from her work.
“Yeah? Where in Kentucky?”
Calloway County, we told her.
“I’m from Bowling Green.”
I must have sounded incredulous.
“Bowling Green, Kentucky?”
“Yeah,” she said, flashing a knowing smile.
I occasionally meet Kentuckians in my travels outside the Commonwealth but was surprised to meet a 26-year-old Western Kentucky University graduate wrangling mules at the Grand Canyon.
Nasato wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
While studying communications at WKU, she thought about working for a nonprofit but in 2020 began working for dude ranches.
“I worked at a few different places, and I just fell in love with Arizona,” she said.
She was introduced to packing at her first dude ranch job, which was in Montana. She was 21 and, like most 21-year-olds, saw few obstacles in her path that she could not overcome, a can-do attitude that soon proved useful.
“I found out what they did [packing], and I thought that was a really neat skill, and I was really interested in learning. But the people I worked for were a little old-fashioned,” she said, chuckling at the memory, “and thought [packing] was a man’s position.”
She quickly added that her former employers were neither prejudiced nor sexist but simply doubted women were strong enough to handle what can be physically demanding work.
“For a while, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do it,” she said. “But just because they said that, it made me want to do it even more.”
Nasato joined Grand Canyon National Park concessioner Xanterra earlier this year as a packer and makes a couple of trips into the canyon each week along the Bright Angel Trail. It’s approximately 10 miles from the south rim to Phantom Ranch. The well-maintained trail is the park’s most popular, but it is challenging by any measure, particularly the climb out. Bright Angel is an approximately 4½- or 5½-hour trip for a packed mule, depending on the direction. That’s 4½ hours down and 5½ hours up.
“These guys,” she said, patting the mule’s flank, “on the way up, they only carry about 50 pounds because uphill is so much harder. But on the way down they carry about 150 [pounds].”
It’s year-round work, and Nasato admitted that packing and leading mules into and out of the mile-deep canyon on a trail that, in places, is narrow and steep, and, depending on the time of year and weather conditions, sufferingly hot, wet and/or icy, is physically taxing and can be a little intimidating.
She loves it.
“I really would like to keep doing this for a while,” Nasato concluded. “I love learning new things.”
. . .
The Grand Canyon itself is stunning in ways that are easy to understand but difficult to explain. Photos don’t do it justice. They can effectively capture the canyon’s silence and stillness but not the size and grandeur. My work has enabled me to visit some magnificent places. As marvelous as many of those places are, not all live up to the hype. The Grand Canyon does. Go if you can. It’s worth the trip. Look for details at nps.gov/grca.
Readers may contact Gary Garth at editor@kentuckymonthly.com