Ninemile Remount Depot

Before airplanes and fire roads, everything a fire crew needed went in on the backs of mules. The 1929 fire season in the northern Rockies used up every trained animal and experienced packer the Forest Service could find, and crews made do with green mules, green packers and tack that did not fit, with delays and injuries to men and animals alike. Regional Forester Evan Kelley, a former cavalry officer, vowed it would not happen again. In 1930 the service bought the Allen Ranch in the Ninemile valley and set up its only remount depot, modeled on the Army's cavalry remounts.

Between 1933 and 1935 a Civilian Conservation Corps camp of some six hundred men built the place: white Cape Cod-style buildings, barns, corrals, fences, roads and irrigation ditches. The depot bred and trained its own mules, kept around sixty people on staff and as many as two hundred pack animals ready in fire season, made packsaddles for the whole Northern Region and shod Forest Service stock across the country. Specially built Kenworth trucks rushed loaded pack strings toward the fires, and the upper hayfield served as a training ground for the first smokejumpers.

Smokejumpers and roads are what made the depot obsolete, and it closed in the early 1950s, but the ranch never stopped working. It is still a ranger station, winter pasture for Forest Service stock, home of the Northern Region Pack Train and a school for packing and traditional backcountry skills. A visitor center opens in summer, and a self-guided tour of the grounds is open all year.