Packing A Llama Llamas Take Visitors Deep Into Southern Utah’s Little-Visited Canyonlands

Only five hours into our trip, 8-year-old Nicole and 6-year-old Erica had the llamas eating out of their hands.

A breeze trembled the heart-shaped leaves of the cottonwoods budding above our camp. The last rays of sun washed the sandstone pinnacles hulking over our valley. We grown-ups sat on fine red dirt in front of a fire of cottonwood branches.

And Erica squealed, as Balthazar lapped her cupped hands clean of the corn-and-alfalfa gorp that llamas crave.

“It’s a cool feeling!” she sang out.

Your first llama feeding holds a surprise. As the beast dips its head, you anticipate nips from the sharp teeth and slobber from the generous mouth.

Instead, by some trick of Andean evolution, the llama sucks up every last corn kernel with the dry efficiency of a noiseless vacuum cleaner.

Llamas are oddly fascinating creatures, and they make the best pack animals in the world. These South American ruminants have it all over horses or even mules in terms of surefootedness and environmental impact.

A packhorse requires 15 gallons of water a day; llamas, relatives of the camel, take only a few sips a day. Horses graze indiscriminately; llamas browse selectively, as if choosing to let the grasses and weeds survive their onslaught. Their padded, mountain-goat-like hooves leave only shallow imprints, and their deer-like droppings are far tidier than horse manure.

During the last decade, llama packing has boomed, especially in the West, as legions of hikers have hired wranglers who organize guided treks. I preferred to take an elementary one-hour course in llama management and set out with the critters on my own. By now, on my sixth llama jaunt, I had the game down pat.

For Judi Wineland, Rick Thomson, Nicole and Erica, however, llamas were new. Owners of Thomson Safaris, an American adventure travel operator in Tanzania, Judi and Rick had taken their kids camping in the Serengeti. But a foray through southeast Utah with these stoic beasts of burden promised an escapade full of surprises.

As it did for me, trooping through the wilderness with Nicole and Erica. By choice childless, I think kids are nice to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

For our five-day outing, we selected a long, convoluted canyon whose streams ultimately empty into the San Juan River. In five days, the kids and llamas traveled a modest 23 miles; by hiking off on my own after we set up camp, I covered nearly twice as much ground. During those five days, we saw not a single other person.

Because the ledges and alcoves of the canyon, like many others in southern Utah, shelter dozens of prehistoric ruins, a new journalistic ethic forbids identifying the place in print. Suffice it to say that at most a thousand visitors a year penetrate this sandstone paradise.

We rented our llamas out of Recapture Lodge in Bluff, Utah. Jim and Luanne Hook, who own this restful oasis of a motel on the San Juan, have trained, wrangled and rented out some of the best-behaved llamas in the West for 15 years. For $35 a day per llama, plus a transport fee to and from the trailhead, we earned the privilege of sharing the wilderness with Balthazar, Pell Mell and Julio.

Llamas project an aloof dignity. Yet for some reason, folks want to see these animals as cute and cuddly, which they are not. As we separated our three charges from the other llamas in the corral, Jim demonstrated what he called each llama’s “aura.”

“It’s like a force field,” he said. “They don’t allow a person, or even another llama, to get too close to their heads.”

You can clasp llamas about their lower necks, but they jerk their faces away from human touch - as Nicole and Erica discovered through stubborn trial and error.

Such lessons in llama reticence did not sit well with Nicole and Erica. Within hours of our departure, each girl had chosen “her” llama. Nicole adopted Julio, and Erica, Pell Mell.

“I choosed my llama,” Erica later explained, “because he has freckles on his nose, like me,” a reference to Pell Mell’s dappled gray snout.

“I love my llama,” Nicole said the first afternoon, as she led Julio down an old cattle trail, “and he loves me,” she added wishfully.

It was a surprise and a delight to see how easily a 6-year-old grasping an eight-foot lead could manage a 325-pound animal carrying 85 pounds of gear. (Don’t try this with horses.)

You cannot ride llamas. Rather, you pack your belongings in matching panniers slung from a saddle, then strap lightweight duffels such as sleeping bags across their spines.

A common misconception about llamas is that they frequently spit. Llamas do spit at one another, as a way of defending that force-field aura. But only a poorly trained llama will spit at a human.

At night we staked the llamas out with 30-foot leads that allowed them to range in ample circles among the sagebrush and cheat grass. The one thing you must not do with a llama - not ever, not for five seconds - is let go of its lead. These animals put so high a value on personal freedom that they lie in vigilant wait for a chance to high-tail it off to their own backcountry.

On our second morning, we left the llamas staked beside camp and hiked up the canyon. I set off on my own mission, determined to make a long loop that would link my steps with the lowest point I had reached three years before, when on a solo November outing I had explored the canyon’s headwaters, seeing many marvelous things.

This was fine with the girls, who preferred poking and dawdling to my forced march. At a deep pool under a pourover - an overhanging lip of sandstone off which, in flood season, a free-standing cascade spills - they stopped to wade and splash.

Meanwhile, I made my 11-mile loop, basking in solitude. The first flowers of spring were blooming - delicate red penstemon, spiky paintbrush, deep claret cup cactus, above which hummingbirds hovered to drink. I crossed a craggy ridge and entered the canyon’s twin north tributary, hiked up it until it pinched tight, then sauntered back to camp.

Each evening, we loafed in the luxury of llamaville. Had we backpacked into the canyon, our meals would have been spartan. Thanks to Balthazar, Pell Mell and Julio, we dined on canned peaches, smoked oysters, hearts of palm and fresh oranges, toasting our contentment with dollops of almond-flavored tequila and single-malt Scotch.

Rick brought an espresso coffeepot and a pillow, I brought a folding camp chair and Judi brought a library of children’s books. Inside their tent, Nicole and Erica set up an elaborate toy menagerie.

Before bed, Judi read “Charlotte’s Web” to the girls. As I pondered the predicament of Wilbur the pig, who overhears plans to convert him to bacon, I could understand why the girls were inclined to anthropomorphize their llamas.

The next day, as she led Pell Mell down-canyon, Erica, sensing a truth E.B. White had winked at, lamented, “I wish llamas could talk.” Nicole added, “If I were a llama, I’d let people touch my face.”

We loaded the beasts on our third morning and headed down-canyon, pausing twice for lunch and three times to check out Anasazi ruins. Made of mud and shaped stone, these humble dwellings and granaries, erected in canyon-wall alcoves above vertical cliffs, stood perfectly preserved by the desert air.

They were the work of the Anasazi, the ancients who had built Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde and Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon, before inexplicably abandoning the Four Corners region around 1300.

After years of searching for backcountry Anasazi sites, I derived a keener delight from these obscure one-family houses, found on my own, than from the monumental villages in the national parks where I bought a ticket and took a guided tour.

Yet to see these ruins through Nicole and Erica’s eyes was to watch a new shaft of light dance upon the Anasazi. Sometimes Rick and I had to hoist the girls bodily from ledge to ledge to reach the cliff dwellings. At first, Nicole and Erica couldn’t believe that people had actually lived in these tiny dark chambers with dirt floors and doors smaller than our windows. But at once they turned their visit into a beguiling variant on playing house.

In one granary, Nicole and Erica found scores of corncobs. They were devastated when Judi forbade their taking a single cob home.

“Just a little one?” Nicole wailed, to no avail.

Yet beneath another ruin too steep for us to reach, the girls became obsessed with sorting out potsherds. Once Erica had found two pieces whose broken edges fit together, she was determined to reconstruct the whole pot.

Rick and Judi seemed content to build their daily agenda around their daughters’ whims, whether that meant teaching the fine points of affixing marshmallows to willow sticks or supervising puddle baths.

Watching, I wondered what I had missed in my kidless life, for in each girlish shriek of delight and sob of frustration lay, I judged, the joys and tribulations of parenthood.

By now we had begun to grasp the characters of our llamas. Balthazar, who by default had become my llama, was a snow-white, stately beast, with one black bob on his tail. A year or two older than his callow companions, he was happy only when going first on the trail. Following, he tended to breathe over my shoulder or give me a hortatory nudge.

I was intrigued to see, as Jim had promised, that while a llama will gently bump an adult, all three of ours were extremely careful not to stumble on Nicole or Erica when they suddenly stopped and knelt to pull the stickers out of their socks.

Pell Mell, with his freckled snout and orange ears, was the phlegmatic one of the trio, though actually the strongest. Brown-and-white Julio was like a teenager raiding the fridge, stopping at every bend to gobble grasses. Only by digging in her heels and yanking hard on her lead (as Jim had taught us to do) could Nicole remind the llama of the job he was hired to perform.

So the days passed in a blissful blur of ease and exercise. We visited, all told, 11 Anasazi sites, finding, besides the dizzy cliff-edge houses, panels of stern and enigmatic rock art: blank-faced humanoids, lizard-men, flute players, snakes, spirals, abstract zigzags that may signify lightning storms.

Twice I climbed out of the canyon and crossed high mesas, gazing at the Abajo Mountains in the north and the Carrizos in the south. At night we watched satellites and meteors, or stared into the fire until the flames danced us to sleep.

Five days allowed only a dilettante’s taste of this intricate canyon for us adults, but it was the right length of time for the girls.

Once only, Erica lost it, when a red ant bit her on the neck. Between gusts of tears, she sobbed out, “I want to go home. I’m never going anywhere again!” But moments later, she and Nicole were back arranging sticks and stones on the stream bank, pouring water on their mudworks and narrating their play with endless riffs of fantasy babble.

Listening in, I felt grown-up envy. To recapture the faintest echo of that stream-bank world, we oldsters had to plunge into the wilderness and play our compulsive games of discovery, exiled for good from the carefree idyll that is childhood.

MEMO: David Roberts is the author of the recently published book, “In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest,” (Simon and Shuster).

This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO In a one-or two-hour lesson, often delivered at the trailhead, a good llama outfitter such as Jim Hook will teach you how to saddle your llama, pack and hang matching panniers, groom the burrs and sticks out of the animal’s thick hair and feed the creatures (in most wilderness areas, llamas carry 3 pounds per day of their own feed). You will also learn how to lead the llama with a short rope by day and stake him out on a longer lead at night. Both leads are clipped at the chin to a nylon face halter, which is never removed. Jim and Luanne Hook, owners of Recapture Lodge in Bluff, Utah, are the only llama outfitters operating in the prime canyon country of southeast Utah. They charge $35 per day per llama, plus 70 cents a mile to ferry the pack animals to and from the trailhead. The best months for Utah trips are April, May, September and October. Book your llamas at least two months in advance, c/o Recapture Lodge, P.O. Box 309, Bluff, Utah 84512; 801-672-2281. To pack in to certain canyons on Bureau of Land Management land, a permit must be obtained in advance from the BLM, Moab District, P.O. Box 7, Monticello, Utah 84535; 801-587-2141. Another top-notch outfitter, Buckhorn Llama, runs trips and leases llamas in northern Colorado and the San Juan Range of southwestern Colorado: Buckhorn Llama Co., P.O. Box 64, Masonville, Colo. 80541; phone and fax 970-667-7411. In the Wind River Range of Wyoming, Scott Woodruff runs a first-class llama operation: Lander Llama Co., 2024 Mortimore Lane, Lander, Wyo. 82520-9771; 800-582-5262 or 307-332-5624.