Restless in the off season between summer wagon rides and winter sleigh rides, 14 mules from the Frisco Adventure Park staged a “bray”-kout Thursday, Sept. 19, and cruised around town for two hours before being caught. Two mules in particular, sisters Dolly and Jolene, led the great escape, according to Sierra Madrigal, the mule manager for Two Below Zero.
“They were the ones that mastermind the entire escape, and they were the last ones to be caught,” Madrigal said. “They’re the ones that are the brains of the operation. They took it upon themselves to go find pasture.
” Sometimes slandered as dumb creatures, mules are actually “extremely smart animals,” and Dolly and Jolene were “pretty much able to disassemble the pen” at the Adventure Park by lifting up on a panel, Madrigal said. Usually this time of year, the mules will be put out to pasture, but Two Below Zero recently lost its pasture lease and has not been able to find a new pasture, leaving the mules to remain in their pen through the fall, she said. “We lost our lease that we’ve been using for many years, so they are unfortunately still in the pen for the off season,” Madrigal said.
“So they are getting a little antsy, and I think that is what contributed to the breakout.” It was around 2:30 p.m.
when the Summit County Sheriff’s Office got a call for horses, later identified as mules, running across Colorado Highway 9 near the Adventure Park, Sgt. Mike Schilling said. Deputies responded, two of whom were horse owners that ended up being “the right people for the job,” Schilling said.
The main goal was to keep the horses off Colorado Highway 9 and the recpath, where they could pose a safety hazard, he said. “Fourteen horses is funny, and it was kind of beautiful with the backdrop of the fall season,” Schilling said. “But it is a serious incident.
It is a legitimate public safety call.” Madrigal said the mules took a few laps from the Summit High School area to St. Anthony Summit Hospital, mostly along the recpath.
While most of the mules stayed together, two of the older mules stayed behind. She explained that the mules form teams of two, usually siblings, that will pull together and can’t be mixed and matched. “The oldest team we have — our little old ladies, we call them — they decided not to follow the group and were caught right off the bat,” Madrigal said.
“They didn’t make it out of the Frisco Adventure Park. They saw the younger ones run off and decided it wasn’t worth it.” Deputies and Two Below Zero staff were eventually able to get eyes on the mules and keep them contained to an area near the hospital, Madrigal said.
The team lured the mules in with bags of grain and formed a circle to keep them from running off, she said. Staff who the mules recognized then slowly approached the animals, put a halter on them and tied them to a tree until a horse trailer was ready to shuttle them back to the Adventure Park, Madrigal said. Dolly and Jolene, the troublemakers of the day, were the last to be caught, she said.
“They stayed uncaught for longer than the rest,” Madrigal said. “They were definitely more worked up than the rest of them. It’s possible they knew they were in trouble.
Not that we would scold them or anything, but they knew they weren’t supposed to do that.” Schilling noted that this is not the first time the Sheriff’s Office has responded to livestock on the loose. Earlier this year, the Sheriff’s Office helped secure a horse that got loose in Breckenridge .
But this latest incident might be the most animals the Sheriff’s Office has had to wrangle at once, he said. Madrigal noted that the mule pen has been repaired to prevent the mules from escaping in the future. She said that Two Below Zero is continuing to look to rent a pasture where the mules can graze and anyone that might have an appropriate, fenced-in pasture should contact the company.
After their jaunt around town, Madrigal said the mules are anxiously awaiting the start to the upcoming sleigh ride season. “They do really enjoy it,” Madrigal said. “They’re bred to like working a job — to have energy, to do their job.
If they didn’t like their job, they wouldn’t do it. There’s no forcing these animals to do anything they don’t want to.”.
