We’re four months behind the fire. Charred boles protrude like ranks of black toothpicks from old snow. The hills march in dark monochrome to November’s gray horizon. All within sight of this trail has been incinerated. “A decade ago we’d have welcomed that heat,” smiles Jack Hooker. Where lodgepoles smoked last August, deep cold had washed over late-season elk hunters in 1996. “We shot a young bull on Cooney Creek. It was 20 below. We figured temperatures would moderate. So instead of fighting the cold to pack meat that day, we left the elk propped open to cool.” It cooled fast, for the mercury plummeted that night. “To minus 30,” Jack recalls, “and it kept sinking. We all moved to the cook tent, threw manties over our sleeping bags and huddled there.” Despite roaring fires in the stoves, thick frost formed inside, and an iron cold seeped up from the earth. “We took the legs off the stoves and set them on the ground to thaw it.” Passing 50 below in free-fall, the scarlet column in his thermometer surrendered at the bottom of the glass.

The Bob Marshall tests travelers who thread its trails, especially those who wrest a living from them. Jack Hooker has been doing that most of his life.

Adversity came early. Born in 1930 near Hermiston, Oregon, Jack was just 3 when his parents divorced. “I got shuffled around, ended up with an uncle who broke horses.” Jack got along well enough with the horses. “I rode six miles to a one-room school.”

At age 13, Jack figured he needed work more than another semester of studies. He saddled up and, trailing a pack horse, rode to Nevada. There he broke wild stock. Heading north again in 1944, Jack landed in Umatilla, Oregon, where a rancher named Westermayer offered him board if he’d attend school during the day and work the kinks out of ranch horses after classes. Jack stayed just long enough to break his nose in a high school football game. Sidelined, he quit school. He joined the rodeo circuit to ride saddle broncs as an amateur. Entry into this brotherhood was all the easier because Westermayer leased stock to rodeos.

Jack soon became the man to beat. “I won at Calgary, clinched the Nevada State Championship, placed number two in Idaho.” He shrugs. “Actually, I was too long an amateur.” But Jack is not one to rake cold coals. “I was pretty good,” he grins.

In Ukiah, Oregon, in 1948, Jack took one ride too many. “I’d won the saddle bronc competition,” he says. “The rodeo was over, the pick-up men all gone. Then someone hailed me from the chutes, said he had a horse that couldn’t be rode. I told him he could stay unridden as far as I was concerned. I certainly didn’t need the practice. But we drew a crowd right away. Cowboys can bait with the best, and I gave in.”

It proved a fateful decision. “That horse was crazy! He blasted out of the chute, bucked a couple of times, then shot across the corral at a dead run. I’d have bailed off, but the cowhands who’d volunteered as pick-ups were too tight behind. I’d have been trampled.” Jack tried in vain to wave them back, then braced as his mount crashed into a heavy plank gate. “I lifted my on-side leg to protect it, but the horse swapped ends at the last second. My other leg took the full impact.” Horse and rider splintered the gate. Jack Hooker flew from the saddle and cannon-balled into a pen full of rodeo horses. They stampeded, their murderous hooves beating a drum-roll he heard only briefly.

He awoke in Pendleton’s hospital, his leg a mess. He fought off blood poisoning and doctors who advised amputation. “Penicillin was new then. We didn’t know its limits. I had many injections.” Contrary to medical prognoses, Jack began to heal. Still, physicians warned he’d never walk normally. Three months later he limped off to a job driving a Caterpillar tractor on an Oregon wheat ranch. “I stretched my leg out on the console to keep it straight,” he says. “But soon I noticed it was getting more flexible. The vibration of that D-8’s engine was stretching muscles and ligaments. I got aggressive with exercise then, bending my leg until it hurt and repeating until I couldn’t stand it any longer.” Though Jack would eventually have both knees replaced, his therapy worked. After a while that leg was strong enough to swing over a saddle.

“Jumping back on a horse didn’t make sense to everyone. But I missed the rodeo,” he says simply.

Jack managed a few rides before someone told him about the draft. “I was essentially homeless,” Jack explains. “So Uncle Sam didn’t know much about me. I registered, then, willing to serve but assuming my leg injury would disqualify me.” It didn’t. War erupted in Korea by the time Jack arrived at boot camp in Columbia, South Carolina. “That was in 1950.” He trained as an Army tank driver, but got some saddle time, “because my commanding officer had cowboy in his blood and let me enter local rodeos.”

Volunteering for overseas duty, Jack was promptly shipped to Korea. He almost completed a tour before returning to tend his sick mother. Shortly thereafter, Jack was Korea-bound on a second deployment. “The fighting hadn’t stopped yet, and an artillery blast damaged my ears. The Army sent me to Japan for retraining.” Assigned to the Signal Corps, Jack took part in clean-up around Seoul. Climbing a power pole one day, he took his safety belt off to swing himself around a transformer that should have been dead. It was not.

The charge blew Jack off the metal pole. He plummeted 50 feet to frozen ground. “I’ve been lucky many times,” he muses. “But never any luckier than that day in Seoul.” He awoke in a hospital, struggling to recall what had happened—in fact, unable to remember much at all. His faculties eventually returned, but his military service was over. Discharged in 1952, he headed for the Northwest.

“In the Army, I’d been sending paychecks to my mother,” says Jack. “When she died, I approved transfer of those funds to my father, though he’d hardly figured at all in my upbringing.” When Jack called on his father in Idaho and asked for the savings, “he pointed to a skidder by the shed and said he’d invested it all in logging equipment.” Jack’s smile is cherubic. “That upset me at the time, but I’m okay with it now.”

The rodeo circuit beckoned. “I knew the places, the people,” he says. “The arenas were home. In the saddle I had a job, and I did it well.” But age and injury had sapped Jack’s agility. “I hadn’t lost a lot—just enough to get hurt again.” The horse was Corn Flake, notorious for his jack-hammer ride. Jack drew him at Boise in 1955. “That cuckoo horse went over on top of me.” Jack winces. “Crushed my injured leg again.” Legendary saddle bronc rider Casey Tibbs and bull-riding champion Jim Shoulders did what they could to cheer their comrade. “But I overheard them in the hall outside my hospital room. It was clear they thought my rodeo days were over. I can’t remember ever feeling so low as then.”

One evening in the fall of that year, Jack Hooker walked into a Missoula bar after a mediocre ride at a local rodeo. “I knew my shot at a national saddle bronc championship was behind me,” he recalls. That long-standing dream had sustained him through hard times. He’d ridden bulls and in bare-back events, but his star was hitched to the pommel of a saddle. Now his body lacked the balance and muscle and reflexes to keep him at the top of the charts.

“I’d already started to lean on liquor,” he tells me. “That night I’d probably have gotten looped if Tom Edwards hadn’t showed up.” Edwards ran a ranch and an outfitting service on the North Fork of the Blackfoot near Ovando. He was looking for young men who knew horses and could manty-up a load and tie a diamond hitch. “I didn’t know how to put anything on a horse except a saddle.” Jack chuckles. Still, at dawn the next day, he showed up at Whitetail Ranch.

It was a new beginning for Jack Hooker. Tom gave him a crash course in packing, “but not much time to practice. A few days after I arrived, Tom gave me a list of stock and goods and told me to meet him in the Danaher. Then he left. I’d never been in the Danaher, didn’t know how to get there or how to keep a string of mules lined out on 20 miles of wilderness trail.” Somehow, Jack got the animals packed—then packed again after finding he’d loaded all too light and had piles of gear and grub left over. He found the Danaher, too, a broad, picturesque drainage deep in the Bob.

	The North Fork of the Blackfoot River ushers hunters into the vast Scapegoat and Bob Marshall wilderness areas from the south. (photo by Wayne van Zwoll)

Tom was among the first outfitters to grasp the potential in hosting professional and government groups. Says Jack: “He tailored trips for organizations like the Wilderness Society, and contracted to take Forest Service brass into the backcountry. Those groups paid well.” Naturally, Tom also courted hunters. “In those days, the Danaher had some of the finest elk hunting in the West. It was written up in outdoors magazines. Hunters shot big bulls, and our success rates ensured solid bookings.”

Winters found Jack Hooker in Nevada, working with mustanger Frank Morgan. “We caught wild horses, then selected the best to train as pack horses and saddle stock. The rest ended up as dog food.” At first they worked only from the saddle. “Then Frank bought an airplane and asked if I wanted to fly.” Jack earned a student license and “plowed furrows with the prop a few times chasing horses.” Once, flummoxed by a recalcitrant mare, Jack swung in front to turn her. Wheels almost ticking the sage, he barreled straight ahead, sure she’d chicken out first. She did not. Yanking the stick back at the last second, he tipped the tail into the dirt. “I over-corrected for the bounce and nosed in. It was a rough ride through the windscreen.”

At first, Jack heeded cowboys who dispensed aeronautical advice from the saddle. Then one told him a rope studded with beer cans would hurry those mustangs along. “I soon found I couldn’t fly the plane holding a rope in one hand, so I tied it to the seat.” That solution worked until the rope snagged in the sage. The airplane augured in. “Still,” he says, “I never got badly hurt flying.” A hard dally on the horn entailed more risk. “One mustang cut sharply, pulling the rope taut under my horse and upending it.” Jack endured 60 painful miles to the hospital with a mangled arm.

In Nevada, Jack found Marilyn. He brought her back to Montana as his wife. There Tom Edwards offered him a partnership in Whitetail Ranch. “But Marilyn urged me to build an outfitting business of my own.” The couple landed in Wallowa County, Oregon. In 1962, Jack procured a GI loan to develop Eagle Cap Pack Station. “We catered to conservation groups and the Forest Service, packing them into the Eagle Cap Wilderness just as I had led trips into the Bob Marshall. We ran a day-ride operation at Wallowa Lake during the summer and outfitted deer and elk hunters come fall.”

Jack also bought Freezeout Ranch on the Imnaha River, a few miles upstream from its confluence with the Snake. “Doug Tibbetts ran jet boats; I ran packstrings,” says Jack. “We arranged for customers to take round trips, half with Doug, half with me.” The Freezeout property became a base for hunts along the Snake and on Deep Creek. The business grew fast and “almost too big.” In 1968 Jack decided to sell Eagle Cap Pack Station but keep Freezeout Ranch for hunting clients. “The first serious buyer wanted both.” He shrugs. “I could see more restrictive hunting regulations in Oregon’s future, and I really did want out of the Wallowa Lake venture. Traffic at the lake was still strong—we kept college girls busy leading day rides—but caring for 265 horses and mules had become a chore. I finally chose to let it all go.”

Freed of their Wallowa County obligations, Jack and Marilyn returned to Montana to find another hunting operation. As in Oregon, the progressive 10-day, 20-person trail rides once popular with nonprofit and agency groups would taper off within the decade. “I didn’t know that at the time. I just wanted to guide hunters,” says Jack. After searching fruitlessly in Idaho and Montana for an outfitting business with just the right assets, he resolved to look in British Columbia. But first he stopped to see his mentor, Tom Edwards.

“As soon as he heard my intentions, Tom hollered, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were looking for a place, Jack? I’d have sold you this one!’ I was flabbergasted. It never occurred to me that Tom would part with Whitetail Ranch. Turns out Tom’s wife was very ill, and he was ready to exit the business. He’d taken earnest money already from a man both of us knew. Right there he got the buyer on the phone and told him I wanted the ranch. I almost fell over when the fellow replied, ‘Hell, if Jack wants it, let him have it!’ That was nearly 40 years ago.”

Early in his third Montana season, Jack’s wife Marilyn died in a traffic accident. He was left with their three children: Bill, 11, and two daughters, Sandy and Jodie, 10 and 5. The business required full-time attention and prolonged stays in wilderness camps. “Karen Geary came to help after the funeral,” Jack recalls. “She pitched in to free me up for pack trips. It wasn’t easy. But we kept the wheels turning.”

Karen, 16 years younger than Jack, had grown up on her parents’ cattle ranch near Ovando. “My father had been in the outfitting business early on,” she tells me. “I was 6 when he got injured and sold out.” After parochial school in Bozeman, Karen earned a nursing degree in Portland. That was in 1969. She worked in Oregon, Washington and Alaska before returning to Montana. Following a stressful divorce, she found new purpose sharing Jack’s load on the North Fork of the Blackfoot. The two married in May 1972.

By that time, Jack was ready to move his elk camps back into the Danaher. “Surging numbers of elk had started to scar the Bob Marshall as early as the mid-1950s,” he says. “In my first years with Tom, I remember cropped willows and diseased animals. A die-off followed. Hunting had deteriorated by the time I left for Oregon, and Tom moved his tent camps southwest of the Bob to the Bitterroots. I hunted there for three seasons after returning. But by the early ‘70s, elk herds in the Danaher had strengthened.”

Hunting in that legendary valley kept improving—though demand for progressive summer trips tumbled when the Wilderness Society suddenly stopped booking. “Long elk seasons and a good supply of trophy-class bulls sustained us during that time,” Jack remembers. “We stepped up efforts to fill off-season schedules; still, 70 percent of our clients were repeats. So we never lacked business.”

The fires of 1988 burned great swaths of the Bob Marshall, but left the Danaher drainage largely untouched. Subsequently, elk drifted out of that area for second-growth that followed the burn. “Hunting in the Danaher got tough, but I kept the permit there because I knew the animals would be back.”

In 1996 Jack and Karen sold the Whitetail Ranch lodge and what they called the air strip—property bordering the ranch and adjacent to a broad 1,500-acre prairie where Jack wintered his stock. “We wanted to divest ourselves of that quarter-section and the lodge,” he explains, “to focus on outfitting.” The couple established new headquarters on the prairie: a house and a bunkhouse, barns and sheds and corrals. Hard against the Bob Marshall, they lie in the shadow of peaks guarding its south entrance.

“The people who bought the lodge wanted to keep the original name,” Jack tells me. “Instead of causing a fuss, we changed our brand to WTR Outfitters.”

	Jack and Karen Hooker, owners of WTR Outfitters, have been Elk Foundation supporters since 1986. (photo by Wayne van Zwoll)

Competitive by nature, Jack had already turned an eye to the Iditarod. The 1,000-mile dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome had been established shortly after Alaska’s 1967 centennial to commemorate the 1925 mercy run in which sleds rushed diphtheria serum north to stem an epidemic. “Until I entered,” Jack says, “I don’t believe anyone from the Lower 48 had ever registered.” That was in 1976. “I finished 19th in a field of 55. But I remember most vividly the after-race dinner, when I was introduced as ‘no cheechako.’ It was high praise from veteran Alaskan dogsledders!”

And it inspired Jack to enter the 1977 Iditarod. He started strong—“actually took the lead on the Yukon River. I was running third when I reached a village just 100 miles from the finish. The track of the leaders vanished in the skid marks of local traffic. So I asked directions from a fellow who pointed me into the night. I followed that track 30 miles until it ended at a lake.” The 60-mile loop dropped Jack well back in the pack. But he pushed hard to the line, passing a dozen mushers to come in 9th. There’s no bitterness in his eye, albeit he’s sure the leaders had something to do with that bum steer. “You learn charity,” he grins.

His charity wears thin from time to time, when a wrangler gets rough with a colt, or a tent sags in elk camp. Jack Hooker came up the hard way, having to make good without much help and to get it right the first time. He shows surprising grace to people who have trod smoother paths.

“Sure, elk hunting has changed,” Jack leans back and rubs his chin philosophically. “Elk hunters weigh more now. They seem less ambitious.” On the other hand, he concedes, clients during the early days often asked him to shoot their elk. “I killed lots of bulls on other tags. It wasn’t legal, even then. But it was common practice. The Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks eventually cracked down—said we couldn’t even finish elk for clients. At that point Tom prohibited guides from packing rifles. That’s still my policy.”

His most memorable hunt? Jack laughs. “I could write a book about memorable hunts. Some I’d repeat. Others I’m glad happened only once.” He recalls a fellow with leukemia whose long-time wish was a backcountry elk hunt. “He killed not only a fine bull but an outstanding mule deer,” says Jack. “He died soon after. His family wrote to say he’d talked almost non-stop about that hunt until the very end.” Another client had a goat tag, “so we climbed Scapegoat Mountain, where we found a nice billy and killed it. On the way down, we spotted two bull elk battling it out. We sneaked within range. Just as my client was about to shoot, I spied a big mule deer buck bedded above them. I told the man to shoot the biggest bull, then swing around and kill the buck. He got them both. Quite a day.”

Indeed. Quite a life. Jack Hooker might even say so—though he’d tell you, too, that he’s fortunate to have survived the bruisings of chute and trail, and to have shared both with people equally enamored of rough stock and wild places.