Lou: So then, we’d get together the crew, as many people as I could find and pack shovels and a long pole and the dynamite on pack mules. But we made it up to the pack station without anything happening. Marye: Well, he cautioned me then, “Don’t go over any bumps,” and this was the old road too, it wasn’t the new Sherwin Grade, so then I got nervous. Lou: And he had you put them in the glove box, I guess, of the station wagon, and so then Marye came up the hill with the kids. So he takes the dynamite back in and he wraps it all carefully up and then he takes the caps… You’re going to carry it in this?” and “Yes,” I naively said. She was in a kind of a car seat, and he got a little pale. He looked at my station wagon with the three little girls in there, and Leslie was just a baby. Marye: Well, I’d already picked up the groceries, so the car was full of groceries. Lou: So she pulled up to the hardware store and said, “I’m here to pick up the dynamite.” So he carried out the cases of dynamite and the caps. Giles: So now I’d like to interject, and ask you to imagine Marye Roeser, on her way out of the grocery store, with her kids in the back seat the family station wagon, ready to check off the last item in her shopping list: the dynamite. You didn’t have to have permits or anything in those days you just bought it like any other hardware supply. So I just asked Marye to pick up the dynamite on her way home. Normally, it was one of us packers who picked up the dynamite from Hirschorn’s hardware store. Lou: And with a heavy year, like ’52 and ’69 and ’83, what we did to open the trails if the snow was really deep, is we’d use dynamite and blow the snow. As they tell it, in 1969, all it took was a trip to the hardware store, some guts, and a little TNT. Marye and Lou Roeser, former owners of the Mammoth Lakes Pack Outfit, used to take trail snow removal into their own hands after big winters like the one we had this year. Giles: For those of you waiting eagerly to get out to Duck Pass this summer, consider this story, as reported in this week’s print edition of The Sheet. Stories from the Sage: Tales from California’s Eastern Edge
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