John Hollenbeak has a new crew of workers to help maintain hiking trails this summer in the Eagle Cap Wilderness and Hells Canyon, and they’re a wild bunch.

But not as wild as they used to be.

And they’ll each haul more than 100 pounds of gear with nothing but grass and water to keep them going.

Neither of which is an attribute common to trail workers.

Except Hollenbeak’s new crew that will work in the wildest parts of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest isn’t human.

It’s equine.

These 11 mustangs grew up roaming the sagebrush steppe of Nevada, a state that harbors 28,000 wild horses, the BLM estimates.

The BLM, which oversees the Wild Horse and Burro Program through a 1971 federal law, periodically captures wild horses in Nevada, Oregon and other western states, to ensure the animals don’t overpopulate their habitat.

The agency offers many of those horses for adoption.

But private pastures aren’t the only potential destination for these animals.

At the Northern Nevada Correctional Facility in Carson City, inmates train dozens of wild horses each year.

The training, which can reach 300 hours for some horses, makes the animals more attractive to potential adopters.

But the inmates’ efforts also result in horses well-suited for working in wilderness areas such as the Eagle Cap, where the motorized vehicles that typically do our heaviest lifting aren’t allowed, Hollenbeak said.

Earlier this year Hollenbeak, a recreation technician who manages the horses and mules that trail-maintenance crews use in the Eagle Cap and Hells Canyon, and other Forest Service workers drove to Nevada to pick up the 11 mustangs. There was no cost for the horses, except travel expenses.

The horses nearly double the Wallowa-Whitman’s complement of 13 pack animals, which includes five mules and eight horses.

“They’ll fit in really nicely I think,” Hollenbeak said. “These mustangs are usually a nice cross of the best attributes of horses and mules. I have pretty high hopes for them.”

Hollenbeak’s optimism is based on his own time in the saddle — he rode each of the 11 mustangs in Nevada — and on past experience in the wilderness.

These 11 horses won’t be the first formerly wild animals to navigate the switchbacking tracks of the Eagle Cap.

Hollenbeak, who started with the Wallowa-Whitman at Riggins, Idaho, in 1991 (the Wallowa-Whitman manages the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, parts of which are in Idaho) said the forest adopted several trained wild horses in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

One of those horses — 25-year-old Little Bear — still plods into the Eagle Cap each summer bearing loads tools, camping gear and other equipment that trail crews need.

“He’s been an excellent pack horse and riding horse,” Hollenbeak said of Little Bear.

See more in the May 2, 2016, issue of the Baker City Herald.