Mules make short work of land clearing project
There is still something to be said for the “Old ways” of doing things.
Perhaps that’s what made Doc Wilson’s ears perk up when he heard about Ethan Fortner’s ability to clear land using a team of mules.
“When I met Ethan, he asked if I’d be interested in having him and his cousin clear my property using his mules, and I immediately thought ‘My uncle Walter would love this idea,’” Wilson said. “Walter was an old-school renaissance man of sorts. He enjoyed using primitive tools and doing hard work in a way that he found rewarding. I remember he used to cut his lawn with an old sling blade.”
Wilson, whose property is located between Highlands and Cashiers, is building a home from start to finish. The access road to the property is rutted dirt, and in order to make a usable homesite, several large trees needed to be removed.
Before getting too deep into the process, Wilson called Duke Energy to ensure that he could get electric utility access, and that is where his path crossed with Fortner.
“Ethan’s day job is as a site administrator for Duke Energy, so he’s the one that came out to discuss power service and where we could run power lines to the property,” Wilson said. “It was during that first meeting he mentioned his mule team. I was intrigued right away.”
On Tuesday, Fortner and his two mules were hard at work pulling large trees downhill to a landing area where Fortner’s cousin Andy Queen was busy loading them onto his log truck.
The ringing of “gee” and “haw” from Fortner’s booming voice acted as an audible steering wheel for the team of 10-year-old mules. With nothing more than a couple of chains, the mules easily dragged logs weighing close to a ton.
“The great thing about using mules is that we aren’t tearing up the land with tractors, skid steers, and a bunch of other machinery,” Fortner said. “What we are doing is 100 percent sustainable. I love to be out here, outdoors, working with my hands and the mules honestly seem to enjoy it to. They are working animals and we treat them very well.”
Fortner noted that training a mule, or a team of mules, is not a hobby that anyone masters overnight. He got his team when they were two years old and spent more than a year training them to understand his commands.
“Now they’re in their prime, and we use them for all kinds of tasks around our farm,” Fortner said. “We plow with them, pull the hay wagon, do all sort of things. The working age for a mule is really from age 3 to about age 17-18, or so, depending on how healthy they are and how much exercise they get.”
Fortner noted that there are roughly 10-12 farms in his native Jackson County that still use mules in their daily operations. Being able to direct a team of mules properly for farm work is a labor of love that Fortner picked up from his grandfather.
“It’s not something you do on a whim, it’s an investment and it takes time,” Fortner said. “These two are like members of our family. Some people have dogs or cats that they treat like their children, I have mules, horses and farm animals.”
As the mules plodded their way down the dirt road to the landing for a second time on Tuesday, Wilson couldn’t help but think back to simpler times.
“It’s too bad uncle Walter isn’t here to see this, he’d be right in his element,” Wilson said. “He was always an advocate for doing things the ‘old way’ and that’s exactly what Ethan and his team are doing. It’s really something to watch them work.”