Headwaters of the Yellowstone Bed & Breakfast

Yellowstone December

We woke this morning to the first truely cold day we've had in awhile and while the grass is still brown and visible, full on December has come to Electric Peak and most of the Yellowstone plateau.  

It's a time to settle in here a little bit and to get out the knitting needles, the cider and the cookie cutters in preparation for all the activity ahead.  

We wish all our guests and friends plenty of time together in the coming month...and plenty of quiet moments just to reflect on the passing year.  

PEACE.

The Reid Family 

Pumpkin Bars for a Crowd

It is the holiday season and the potlucks, ballet recitals and parties have begun!  I've been fiddling with this recipe for years and I think I've finally found a version that fulfills my expectations. (When it comes to baked goods, I always have some!)   These are wonderful pumpkin bars.  Moist but not greasy, they are full of pumpkin flavor.  Not too sweet, one could argue that they might even be a little bit good for you.  

NOTE:  This recipe makes a full sheet pan of bars PLUS a 9 inch square to leave at home for the family. I use commercial half sheet pans which may be a little a larger than what you have at home.  It would also make 2-13x9 pans full of cake or a bijillion cupcakes. Frosted with a cream cheese icing, they can be decorated with pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds for a little salty addition.  

I bake mine in a sheet pan lined with parchment paper.  When they are cool, I can lift the entire pan of bars out of the sheet pan and frost, cut and decorate them.  For potlucks, it's great to just be able to lift the frosted bars back into the sheet pan for transport.

 

Pumpkin Bars for a Crowd

8 eggs, lightly beaten

3 cups of granulated sugar

1 large (29 oz.) can pumpkin puree

1 cup vegetable oil (I use canola)

1 cup unsweetened applesauce

4 cups AP flour

1 Tablespoon baking powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 teaspoons salt

1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

Preheat the overn to 350 degrees. Mix together dry ingredients.  In a large bowl, whisk together eggs, sugar, oil, applesauce and pumpkin until thoroughly combined.  Stir in the dry ingredients to make a thick batter.  Spread into the prepared pans (fill 2/3 full - batter will expand) and bake for 35-40 minutes or until the cake springs back when you press it lightly with your finger.  Let cool completely, then frost.

 

Cream Cheese Icing

2 packages of cream cheese (8oz each)

2 sticks of butter

4 cups of powdered sugar

1 Tablespoon of vanilla extract

1/2 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg

Mix everything together with a whisk attachment until light and fluffy.  This frosting keeps well in the refrigerator or the freezer; just rewhip before using.  

 

Rest in Peace, Dear Friend

We all lost a good friend recently when Geoff Faerber passed away September 25th.  Geoff and his wife Liza owned the Flying Pig Rafting Company and provided so many of our guests, friends, and family with Yellowstone River adventure over the years.  Geoff was a true adventurer and someone who challenged me to think differently about our business and about my life in general.  Geoff's rafting guides set up camp on our beach four nights a week and we grew as a business thanks to his influence.  I will miss his presence in our community and in our lives. 

If you had a great ride on the river compliments of Geoff, please consider making a donation to the Myles & Kenyon Faerber Fund c/o 1st Interstate Bank, PO Box 810, Gardiner, MT 59030.  Liza and her sons mean a lot to us and, as they miss their dear husband and father, we commit ourselves to enjoying our little stretch of his favorite river as fully as possible.  It's what Geoff would have encouraged us to do. 

When he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars
And he will make the face of heav'n so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
~William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

The Riverview Cabin Story

 

If you ask me to tell you about the Riverview Cabin's history, I'm afraid there would be holes in my story. During much of it's construction I think you'd find me hiding somewhere (avoiding work) reading comic books or National Geographic back issues (many of which still grace the shelves of the cabin).  If you did catch me hiding, I would be sure to complain about "the land" and give you a number of good reasons why my parents were torturing me on a weekend by making me sit around while they worked on it's construction.  If you think it brings satisfaction to my parents to know that it's my idea of paradise now, you'd be absolutely right.  

The land that the Riverview Cabin sits on was purchased by my parents in 1969.  At that time I was 7 years old; my siblings were 5 and 3.  My father was the resident minister in Yellowstone National Park and we lived in Mammoth Hot Springs, 8 miles to the south.  Since my memories get a little fuzzy here (see above), I've asked my dad to tell the early story of the cabin's construction.

 
 Merv Olson:  We purchased the land in 1969 from Tony and Agnes Stermitz.  It was Tony’s winter horse pasture and was virgin land covered with large sagebrush – some were nearly 10 feet tall!  The first project was to eliminate the sagebrush by pulling it out with a pickup and a chain and burning it.  The kids would ride in the back of the pickup until the sagebrush took over all the room.  We left one large sagebrush on the hillside behind the Riverview Cabin to remind us of those days. 

 We decided that a well was needed so we worked on a joint well with Ted and Holly Scott, our neighbors then and now, located on the property line.  We dug that well by hand and cribbed it with some lodgepole logs and sheets of plywood as we got deeper.  It was below the top of the water table so we had a pulley with a five-gallon bucket to lift the muck out.  We had a cave-in that scared us so we gave up on hole #1 and decided to each have our own well.  Our well was dug with a backhoe and then dug to 28 feet by hand.  [It is now used for irrigating our landscape and garden and for water for the bathhouse.]  This well served us until 1999 when Van Dyken drilled out current well to about 70 feet which now serves all the other buildings on the property.

After the well we put in a septic system with my brother, Dale’s help.  He lived with us during the summer during his teen years.  First we rented a trailer spot.  After we saved a little income from that we started building a cbain in the summer of 1972 for our vacation cabin.  Warren Wagner, a local contractor, dug into the hillside for the foundation.  I dug a trench, mixed the concrete and poured the footings.  Mr. Lundgren from Livingston was hired to build the foundation walls with concrete block and I mixed the concrete mortar.  We were a great team.

      
 
The subfloor was laid and the trusses were assembled on the subfloor and then laid on the hillside while we framed the walls.  Fred Bent and Leon Shaul, family friends, helped raise the trusses.  The first day we tried to do this we put one truss up but realized that the wind was too dangerous so we completed the job another day.  There was no deck in front so it was a long way down to the ground from the roof peak!

The cabin was enclosed just before we left Yellowstone and moved to Malta, Montana.  [Where my dad accepted a pastoral call to a Lutheran church.]  The joke was that every intern had to work on the cabin the day after Easter before the annual pastoral conference at Chico Hot Springs.  The rafters were salvaged from the flat roof of the Gardiner Community Church when an addition was made to the church annex in 1974. 

The deck was added in the summer of 1978.  The 2x12s came from the railroad tressel tht was dismantled just north of the Gardiner school.  We hauled them in the back of the pickup and nearly blew the tires they were so heavy! 

We enjoyed using the cabin for vacations but when the gold mine in Jardine opened there was a demand for housing and Charissa was entering college, so we rented the cabin from then to about 2000.

Some remodeling projects included new windows in the 80s and a new bathroom in 2002.  The cost of the windows was bout 2/3 of the cost of the building of the original cabin.  A new room was installed (metal) after the fires of 1988 by Tim and Charissa’s brother David.  David frightened us all by falling from the room during that project but, thankfully, he was not seriously hurt.  Tim and Charissa have made many changes as well since they moved here in 2009.       

My parents, Merv and Joyce, shared this cabin with many, many people before it became a part of their business.  It hosted youth groups, hunters, friends of friends of friends, and our family on holiday.  Many hands have worked on it's walls; Tim and mine among them.  It's on going project.  

This year we celebrate its 38th year of keeping people warm and dry while they gaze at the amazing Yellowstone National Park view.  All thanks to the foresight and imagination of my parents.  (No thanks to me....but ask me anything about those National Geographics!)  We consider ourselves very lucky to be a part of that legacy. 

Growing

One of the things I let go this summer was any illusion that I could do it all.  Whenever people asked me "How do you do it?" (in response to my schedule, which I'm sure sounded insane and manic to most people), I'd tell them that that my secret was to do everything poorly.  

I can only tell you that this is true and a terrible tactic.  After awhile you end up feeling incompetent and proud of very little.  Multitasking just isn't good for any living things in excess.  It started to erode my self confidence.  Something had to give. 

Unlike my mother, I've got a bit of a black thumb.  This year our rather huge square foot garden just seemed like it was too much for me.  Rather than being an exciting project, it just seemed like a heavy burden.  So, I gave away the garden.  

I surrended all but a few squares (green and herbs) to my friends John and Nina.  They transformed our garden from a patch of weeds (and my pathetic attempt at plantings) into a beautiful green oasis. It was a garden complete with sculpture, art, sunflowers over 6 feet tall and the most tomato hopefuls we've seen to date.  

I highly recommend this community garden tactic.  I got to look at all this planted beauty, see my buddies regularly, eat several bags of sugar snap peas, take full credit for the garden with unsuspecting visitors and (if my evil plan succeeds) I might even get a few tomatoes.  Thanks John and Nina!  You are great gardeners...and even better friends! XO

Thanks for lightening the load. 

Our Montana Summer Reboot

The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it.  ~Author Unknown

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.  ~Will Rogers, Autobiography, 1949

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.  ~Ovid

It’s been over a year since I posted on my blog. The weight of having to write something fantastic keeps me away from another run at consistency.  I got nothing – so I’m jumping right in! 

Last year we ended another successful season on the brink of exhaustion.  Maybe it exposed some weakness in my character or spoke to the workload of a growing family and a business – either way, we were worn out! 

After lots of talks about family and balance and lots of long looks at our growing daughters, we decided to take the summer off.  We needed to see Yellowstone ourselves this year.  Get up early and go wolf watching.  Soak in the Firehole River.  Go to the Livingston Farmer’s Market and the new Harry Potter movie. Sit on the edge of Antelope Creek and watch grizzly grazing.  Sleep in. Breathe. 

So, we’ve spent the summer enjoying our visiting friends and the Olson Family Reunion (so fun!).  We built a bathhouse near the garden (with amazing outdoor showers!) and Tim built a beautiful shade shelter on the beach.  We crossed all sorts of small things off our to-do list and added a few for good measure.  I baked like crazy and tried out a number of new breakfast recipes.  We breathed a big sigh of relief when my dad finished his cancer treatments and we cheered on my mom’s golf game.  Our kids traveled far and wide (Utah, Texas and Illinois) and ended their summer by leaving Tim and I alone for a week.  We became acutely aware of how quiet it was going to be around here soon.  Tim caught a few fish and Olivia took a great course with Yellowstone Country Guardians that gave her a great fly fishing introduction. We enjoyed our cabin guests and the camaraderie of the Flying Pig overnight guides (thanks Brogan, Tyler, Michael and Paul).  We watched the Yellowstone rise and fall and counted drift boats when they started to appear in August.  We played Scrabble and Kick the Can.  We took in all the Montana summer had to offer.  It was sweet and all too short.     

So, the summer Is over.  And with trees full of apples and the cool morning signaling that winter is just around the corner, we are starting to think about bears and snow boots.  It’s time to get back to work. 

We will be making a few small changes here but our business’s mission remains the same.  We want to provide everybody who stays here with the opportunity to relax and enjoy this special place.  When my parents wisely purchased this property over 40 years ago, they instilled in me a respect for its location.  Being on the banks of the beautiful (sparkling, green, fish filled, un-dammed, rushing) Yellowstone River and on the boundary of Yellowstone National Park is a privilege AND a responsibility.  We want to continue to make good decisions that preserve what’s good about being here. 

And, we want to find away to enjoy it ourselves.    

So, here’s to what’s ahead.  And to even better cookies.  

 

Persistent Childhood Memory Cookies

I'm very proud of these cookies.  They are really the first cookies that I have ever created from scratch...although I must admit that I can't take full credit for the inspiration.  

Growing up in Yellowstone National Park meant that the best food we got came directly from our mother's ovens.  No bakery.  No Dunkin Donuts.  Just Mom's home cooking.  

My mom used to make these crispy little cookies that had butterscotch chips in them and, to give them extra crisp, Rice Krispies.  I distinctly remember eating them...but my mother has no memory of ever making them.  And certainly no recipe.   

So, I made them up myself.  They are a great salty sweet oatmeal cookie with an extra crisp crunch, toasted pecans and coconut and not too much butterscotch chip.  The Rice Krispie addition is a little weird - but it's crucial to the texture of the cookie and most people won't be able to guess what the secret is to all that crunch.  This is a cookie with some balance to it...don't overdue the butterscotch chips or it'll just be way too sweet.  I'm pretty sure that its as close as I'll come to a childhood memory cookie.  Thanks Mom.  

Crispy Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies

1/2 cup sweetened flaked coconut

1/2 cup pecan pieces (chopped fine)

1/2 cup shortening

1/2 cup (one stick) unsalted butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup dark brown sugar

2 whole eggs

1 Tablespoon vanilla

1 teaspoon freshly grated orange peel

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 cups AP flour

3 cups of QUICK oats (must be quick - not old-fashioned)

1 1/2 cups Rice Krispies cereal

1/2 to 3/4 cup butterscotch chips (go lightly here)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Place finely chopped pecans and coconut on a baking sheet and toast until golden brown.  (Don't forget about this - they burn easily!)  When toasted, set aside to cool completely.  Meanwhile, cream the butter, shortening and sugars until light in color - about 3 minutes.  Add eggs, vanilla, and orange peel and mix until well-combined.  

In another bowl, whisk together the salt, cinnamon, flour and baking powder.  Add all at once to the wet ingredients and mix until combined.  Add the quick oats and mix some more.  Lastly, add the cooled coconut/pecan mixture, the butterscotch chips and the Rice Krispies.  Mix just until combined - don't overdue the last mixing...I sometimes do this last part by hand.  

Drop onto a greased cookie sheet by the tablespoon and bake for 12-15 minutes until light golden brown. These cookies get crispier as they cool and are great with a cup of tea.   You can freeze the dough in a log and slice it very thinly to bake frozen.  

            My newest thrift store finds...

Pears in Late Summer

I'm quite neglectful of the blog during the summer.  Sorry about that. I think about all sorts of things that I need to post and I actually keep a list of upcoming posts and requests during June, July and August.  But, with the first snow already on the peaks, today I want you to make these pears.  I've been offered them in restaurants and passed over the recipe in numerous cookbooks but I finally made them and I just didn't know what I was missing.  

This recipe works perfectly when you have a big box of pears that just don't seem to ripen.  I always feel like pears are hard as rocks and then rotten - it's hard to catch the sweet spot.  Use firm pears.  

In the evening, pour yourself a glass of red wine.  I used a Shiraz.  Just about anything will do.  If you don't want to drink it; don't use it.  Turn on some good, mellow music. Peel the pears, leaving on the stems.  Put them in a pot with what is left of your bottle of wine.  Put in enough wine to cover them almost completely.  I had to sort of mess around with which pot to use for the number of pears I had until I got it just right.  

Add 3/4 cup honey and a pinch of salt.  

Place in a 250 degree over for a few hours (2-3) and then turn off the oven and go to bed.  

In the morning, carefully remove the pears and place on a platter.  The one in the picture was carefully carried across the ocean by my daughter Anna this summer.  (Thanks baby.)  Reduce the remaining liquid into a thick, purple syrup and spoon some over the pears.  They will look like jewelry.  Put the remaining sauce in a pitcher and serve with plain yogurt.  

Several days later (when the pears are long gone) use the remaining sauce to make a gravy for a slow cooked roast with mashed potatoes.  Be glad that you had all those pears.  

Enjoy the last few days of sweet summer. More soon - and for all of our guests who requested recipes, don't worry - I have not forgotten you!   

 Really.  

Goodbye Chickens - Hello Beautiful Pitcher!

It appears that Mr. Reid has a gift for raising chickens.  He's the keeper of our coop and he does a fine job keeping them laying eggs and away from grizzly bears.  The chickens flourish under his watchful eye.

Our little flock is a productive one - we get between 10-12 eggs every day and, this time of year, we use every one.  This spring we decided that we needed to add some new chickens to the flock to keep their ages varied.  (So the eggs just keep on coming...)  A friend down the road fired up her incubator (thanks Wendy!) and just after spring break we became the proud parents of 18 new baby chicks.  

The chicks grew and some show signs being roosters.  Eventually these chickens will become part of the great circle of hobby farm life (dumplings, anyone?) and their female companions will stick around and keep our guests in the best eggs we've ever eaten.  

Which brings me back to Mr. Reid and his chicken raising talents.  Usually, you expect about 20 percent mortality with baby chicks.  We didn't lose a one.  We found ourselves with too many chickens.  What to do?    

The heroic teacher of driver's education at our local school (bravest man we know) came to the rescue!  He and his artist wife arrived this evening to take some of the chickens to their new home in Paradise Valley.  We gave them chickens and Sue gave us the most beautiful rooster pitcher.  What a good trade!  

 

You can visit Sue's website and see other examples of her beautiful work at:  www.suetirrell.com

(Ask her about her chickens!)  

Salmonfly Hatch - Trying to Get Excited About Insects

 

When it comes to bugs and snakes and many amphibians, I'm a bit of a wimp.  Like most people, I find it hard to enjoy what they bring to the table.  Because we live on a big body of moving water, bugs are rarely an issue here.  Mosquito are few and the only real irritation are the teeny tiny non-biting bugs that come through our window screens in late summer and set off the smoke detectors.  

With my bug prejudices but aside, I can appreciate the one big bug that is an anticipated hatch here in this part of Montana.  Home to the Robert  Redford film, "The River Runs Through It", this part of Montana is flyfishing paradise.  Fly Shops are plentiful - from the world famous Bud Lilly's in downtown Livingston, to Sweetwater Fly Shop (they took President Obama on his maiden fishing voyage last summer) to our own second-generation Park's Fly Shop in Gardiner; there are plenty of places to pick up a license, buy some cool gear, and get great local advice about fishing conditions both in the park and along the Yellowstone River.  

I leave the flyfishing to my husband, but even I can appreciate the salmonfly hatch.  It's a spectacular event - a yearly reminder of the vibrant cycles that characterize the longest free flowing river in the western United States - the Yellowstone River.  Usually the hatch coincides with the Fourth of July.  This year, it is a little late.  We saw the first bugs on our beach on the 7th.     

Salmonflys are the largest member of the stonefly family.  These aquatic insects move towards the river shores in a larval state called a nymph.  When the water temperature and levels are just right, the nymphs crawl out of the water and hold on tight to the river shore willows.  When the case that surrounds the developing insect breaks open, and adult emerges - they can be up the three inches in length.  Their life cycle is a fairly quick one - they emerge, let their wings dry and prepare for flight, and then fly out over the river to lay eggs for next year's hatch.  In just 4-6 days, it is all over.  

If you are a trout, the large twitching legs, four wings and clumsy manner make them the perfect prey.  Catching a trout for dinner this time of year, usually reveals a stomach stuffed full of the black and orange bugs.  It is a veritable trout smörgåsbord!

News of the hatch spreads slowly up the valley.  We usually hear when they've hit Livingston and expect them to move upstream at a rate of about 5 miles a day.  When they hit, it's the talk of the town.  

Here's to bugs!  (or at least to this one...)