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Back in the saddle, with hope and fear.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Bob Welch The Register-Guard

Editor's note: This is the first in a three-part series.

SOMEWHERE IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS WHOSE SPECIFIC LOCATION I PROMISED NOT TO TELL - "You must do the thing you think you cannot do," Eleanor Roosevelt said.

So here I am, five years after I was bucked off a horse named Rusty, back in the saddle again.

Here I am, embedded with a group of five elk hunters, the type of leather-skinned guys whose pride I tweaked in 2002 when I wrote how "I don't get hunting." It was like someone in Florence saying they don't get clam chowder.

But after more than a hundred "are-you-nuts?" e-mails, I'd taken up an offer to experience a horse-and-mule trip deep into a wilderness area to see if I could understand a tradition that's as deeply etched into the soul of some Oregonians as the blazes on trail-side trees.

If I'd generally enjoyed the experience - frozen contact lenses in 2-degree weather notwithstanding - I'd also been thrown onto a log by a horse with a dude-ranch name, and had spent the rest of the week walking, not riding.

Now, as...

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