Mule Days

What do you get when you combine 3 Israelsen men, mules, mule-fanatic people, and beautiful weather? A PAR-TAY! For the second half of our vacation, we left Neener's graduation, drove to Bishop, California for Mule Days with Ev's parents. It was so much fun! The events are crazy and just plain fun and the town of Bishop was really nice.

This event consisted of 3-man, 2-horse, and 3-mule pack teams. The let everything loose in the arena and some dude with a bull-whip cracks it above the livestocks' heads and they fire a rifle to begin. The people have to catch their horses and mules, saddle 'em, pack 'em, and then run once around the race track. The first team done wins. WILD!

This guy had 12 mini-mules that he has trained on voice commands (his 13-year old daughter is riding with him). Hyrum got to ride one later in the day.
Hy, Bernie (in the red shirt) and Ev were watching this guy show some fancy knots on his pack mule dummy. I asked Ev if it was informative...he said he just got more confused. Hmmm...

This is the speed-shoeing. These guys got 4 shoes on in under 5 minutes.

And here are the excited spectators! We had such a fun time. I think we'll have to go again someday!