Tucked away in a narrow gorge, 2,000 feet below the rim of the Grand Canyon, sits the tiny town of Supai, the only village on the reservation of the Havasupai Tribe.
It’s hard to get there — you can pretty much only do it on foot, which requires hiking a steep 8-mile trail full of switchbacks. As a result, getting mail in and out of Supai is no easy feat. But Charlie Chamberlain, who’s lived in Supai for over 50 years, and his nephew Nate, have a system.
Sarah Yager, a writer for the Atlantic, joined The Show to discuss how the process involves a pack of mules and a whole lot of patience.
Conversation highlights
SARAH YAGER: Every morning, starting around 8 a.m., Nate will come up to the post office with his string of mules and load up with the day's mail, and strike out on the trail heading up to the top of the canyon.
SAM DINGMAN: How many mules are is it?
YAGER: It's usually about five mules who are carrying the mail and then a mule or horse that Nate himself is riding. So they ride all the way up to the top, and once there, a driver meets them at the trailhead. And picks up the mail that they're carrying to drive it to the next closest post office, which is something like 70 miles away in the town of Peach Springs.
And, also at the trailhead, they pick up the mail that has come in from Peach Springs, load it up on the mules, and head back down. And that whole journey up and down is 16 miles, takes about six hours, and they do it five days a week.
DINGMAN: And just for the visual on this, where is the mail? Is it like strapped are there bags strapped to the mules?
YAGER: Yeah, so there are pack saddles on the mules, you know, sort of wooden structures to which they can lash with ropes. You've probably seen — like if you work in an office building — you might have seen those kind of, opaque plastic USPS crates that are at the top. They use those in Supai too for mail delivery, but they just lash them to the side of a mule.
DINGMAN: There is this wonderful part in the story where Charlie Chamberlain talks to you about this often quoted piece of Postal Service lore about how there's this mandate to deliver the mail in all conditions: Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night shall prevent the Postal Service worker from completing their appointed rounds. But as you write, the Chamberlains and the other folks that they work with, they have to deal with all of that and then some.
YAGER: That's right, you know, I live in Brooklyn in New York. And when you're thinking about bad weather, you know, it might be kind of a bad rainstorm. When you're talking about delivering mail into the Grand Canyon, you're dealing with switchbacks, you're dealing with rattlesnakes, you're dealing with flash floods.
DINGMAN: Some of these floods can be like 7 feet of water ... rushing in kind of out of nowhere, right?
YAGER: Yeah, Charlie told me a story about once being on the trail with his mules, and the floodwaters started rising. He was able to get sort of up and out of the way. He could tell they were really high, but it wasn't until the next day when he was coming back up the trail, he could see from the water lines on the rock that the water would have been over his head, even on horseback.
DINGMAN: Wow, I think this is something you talked to Charlie about. That there is this helipad in the town of Supai, but they still do this via mule train rather than by a helicopter.
YAGER: So, Charlie said that the reason that the mules have persisted is that they're really the most reliable way to get the mail into Supai. The helicopters are seasonal, so they run a few days of the week, but more during the warmer months. Sort of corresponding to tourism. But they're also very sensitive to certain weather. So it gets really windy on the top of the canyon. If there are high winds, helicopters aren't necessarily able to land. But the mules can go up and down — as we were talking about before in reference to the motto — in all kinds of weather. And so, you know, if you're counting on a delivery and the the mules carry things like lab work for the clinics — like things that where there can be some real urgency to things moving in and out of the community — you can count on a mule.
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