COALVILLE — Grant Macfarlane, 71, was taking his annual seven-day pack-horse trip through Wyoming when Pete, the mule, decided to go loco on him.
Granted, Pete may have had reason.
"I think I nicked him with a spur," said Macfarlane, a city attorney, who keeps an 84-acre farm just east of here. "Pete took belches off a puff of smoke.
"He came over the top of me and now I've got this," Macfarlane said, swiveling to reveal a bald spot in back of an otherwise flowing snowy mane. "Got the root hairs. Probably won't grow back."
"It also bruised Grant from his shoulders to his toes, as purple as can be. He can hardly walk," said Shirley Macfarlane, Grant's wife, watching her man shuffle off in that sorta sideways, hobbledehoy a cowpoke displays after some dramatic contact with the stock.
"Shucks," Macfarlane said, "everyone's scarred a little bein' around animals. If it don't hurt some, it probably ain't worth doin' anyway."
It's this type of spirit — the love of the land and the beasts that have roamed them for centuries — that has helped Utah Open Lands carve out huge chunks of ground around Salt Lake City and environs, saving them as spaces that always will remain as undeveloped as the days the first settlers arrived.
"It's a connection to the past, hoping kids can have the type of future people have always been able to enjoy up to now in the true character of the West," said Wendy Fisher, executive director of Utah Open Lands, which held its third annual Ridin' for the Range fund-raising benefit Saturday.
This kind of life would be whittled away, Fisher believes, if not for efforts to raise money to procure lands.
"Spectacular landscapes that inspire us as we live, work and play in Utah are being lost every day," said Fisher, whose organization has preserved 27,108 acres appraised at $30 million. By the end of 2002, Fisher believes the group will have preserved more than 57,000 acres of historic, recreational, agricultural and wildlife lands.
Such efforts couldn't be done, Fisher said, without private initiatives through the generosity and passion for the West of patrons such as Grant and Shirley Macfarlane.
Each was instrumental in getting both sides of their families to agree to donate several thousand acres appraised at approximately $12.9 million to the Utah Department of Forestry, which helps administer a national land legacy program.
The gifts help create conservation easements on which all normal activities — hunting, grazing, horseback riding, hiking, etc. — continue.
"The one thing that can never happen is subdividing for construction," Grant Macfarlane said.
In exchange, donators get some tax breaks and in some cases, cash, "on a property-by-property basis," Macfarlane said.
They also give up the opportunity to develop the land and make multiples of millions.
Why?
"Both of us just have long histories with the land. I know for Shirley, it's a tribute to the tremendous sacrifices her parents made to acquire the land," Grant said.
Shirley's father and mother, Howard and Grace Haynes, felt so strongly about owning land, they foreswore a comfortable apartment life in Salt Lake City. Though he had a mining engineering degree from the University of Utah and she an education degree from Utah State, they opted to live in a sheep camp for two years to save money and buy rangeland.
"Two years, they slept in a tent, on the ground," Shirley said.
"Her mom was as tough as they come, being willing to live that life," Grant said.
Mealtimes meant one thing: sheep.
"Nothin' but mutton," Grant said, laughing. "No lamb. They weren't about to kill a kid. That meant money."
After being laughed at by bankers for trying to acquire "worthless" land up Chalk Creek east of Coalville, Howard and Grace Haynes finally saved up $1,000 and arranged financing to acquire an acre here, an acre there.
The Haynes elected to run sheep for a livelihood.
"Howard slept many a night in his truck, under a tree, on the road for sheep," Grant said. "The land was his life, his treasure."
"When you see what's happening to this (Summit) county, the fastest-developing county in Utah, you just don't want it ever to get filled up with houses, after what Dad and Mom went through," Shirley said.
"You don't want it all to turn into Jeremy Ranch," Grant said.
His side of the family was equally land-oriented.
Grandfather John Macfarlane was head of the Utah Cattlemen's Association, while running herds in Skutampah down by Kanab. In 1913, he became a partner in Clayton Land and Cattle, later the Clayton-Macfarlane Ranch, with some 7,500 acres around the East Canyons.
John Macfarlane also had a 60,000-acre "allotment" for grazing in the western desert, as well as owning pockets of ground there. And he owned approximately 5,000 acres near the Oquirrh Mountains.
"My dad became an attorney and so did I, so it wasn't until later in life I was able to acquire some stock and ground to live the Western life my grandad did," Grant said.
But since age 7, Grant's family always visited grandpa, and he learned to love the riding life. Right up until the moment Pete acted up the other day.
It was Grant Macfarlane's 20th straight year of pack-horsing through Wyoming.
Would it be his last?
Shirley laughed and said, "When our grandkids found out what Pete had done, they said, 'Aww. Pete's gonna have to go to timeout.' "
No timeout for Grant, though?
"Ha," was all Shirley could say.
He'll be re-Pete-ing on Pete soon enough, he said.
"It gets in your blood. I love ridin' 'em too much to give it up," Grant Macfarlane said, setting off on a good limping clip toward the corral.
E-mail: gtwyman@desnews.com