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.  

 

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.  

 

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...)

Yellowstone's Boiling River Opens for Summer

Finally.  Thanks to a few warmer days, the snow pack is slowly melting away.  The rivers are slowly responding to the drop in water flow. Our rocky beach has yet to appear but the willows are marching in that direction.  The cool spring has made the salmon fly hatch later than usual (last report it was about 1/2 way up the Paradise Valley) and even the greens in the garden are making only a tiny appearance.  

It's summer.  Kinda.  

One sure sign that we have reached that blessed summer season is that the Boiling River is open again.  Situated between Gardiner and Mammoth, this section of the Gardner River is blessed with a large supply of hot springs water pouring out of its banks - making the river hot in some spots, warm in others and cool on the edges.  Something for everybody.  My favorite is the section where the current cools your feet while the hot water ripples on the surface - a study in the contrasts that characterize our mountain home.  

Bring a towel (it's a quarter mile walk to the springs and a wet walk back) and a contemplative attitude.  To me, sitting in the Boiling River evokes both memories and awe. It's a great place to meet people in the summer (the middle of the day can be crowded), a wonderful place to watch the elk rut in the fall and (my favorite) the quietest place in the whole park on a steamy winter morning.    

A few tips: 

1.  This is a very  special place.  PLEASE treat it with respect.  Obey all posted signs (they are for your safety as well as the safety of this place) and clean up after yourself when you leave.  

2.  Remember that it is NOT legal to soak in Yellowstone's hot springs anywhere in the park. The only other designated swimming area is in Firehole Canyon near Old Faithful; another river way that is blessed with warm water pouring into it.  

3.  The Boiling River is CLOSED at night.  Alcohol and nudity are prohibited.  

Liisa's Fruit Tart

This past year, we had the great privilege of hosting a AFS foreign exchange student in our home. When Liisa first arrived we had no idea what to expect and, I'm sure, neither did she.  Transitioning from a small town in Finland to a really, really small town in Montana wasn't easy.  There were many things to learn.  Liisa proved herself to be extremely adept and finding her way here.  She braved horseback riding and AP History and succeeded at both.  She ate her first sweet potato and saw her first rodeo.  She discovered Pop Rocks.  She learned what it was like to have three younger sisters. She dressed up for the prom and Halloween and, along the way, became very much a part of our family.  

Last week we sent Liisa home.  It wasn't easy!  By now she is swimming in cold Finnish waters, eating rye bread sandwiches and renewing friendships.  She's come home old enough to drink beer and learn to drive. We hope she brought home as many lovely memories as she left behind.  She will always be welcome here.  We love and miss her!      

This tart was Liisa's favorite.  We made a big one together just before she left; I mixed the ingredients and she put them all together.  It came out beautifully.  I promised then that I would post the recipe so she could make it at home.  So, dear Liisa, this one is for you.  

This is a great recipe - flexible, easy to make ahead, and very adaptable.  You can make it with just about any fruit that's in season and vary the flavorings accordingly.  In winter, it's wonderful with plums or apples that have been tossed in a little sugar and cinnamon. This time of year it's all about raspberries, blackberries, blueberries and huckleberries.  

The crust is a press-in crust (which means you don't have to roll out the dough) and it can be prepared ahead of time and refrigerated or frozen before baking.  The filling can be made in advance (I make a double batch and store the rest for the next time around) as well so it's a perfect thing for breakfast.  Pop the crust in the oven, fill the hot shell when brown and top with the best the fruit basket has to offer.  Enjoy.  

Liisa's Fruit Tart

For the crust: 

Cream 1/2 cup butter with 1/4 cup sugar.  Add 1 teaspoon vanilla and 1 cup of all-purpose flour.  Mix until combined and press into the bottom of a greased 8 inch tart pan with a removable bottom.  Watch for thick/thin spots!  Bake at 400 for 15 minutes until golden brown. 

Meanwhile, mix together:

1 8 oz. package of cream cheese (softened), 1/4 cup sugar, 1 egg, 1 teaspoon vanilla and the zest of one lemon (or lime or orange - your choice).  While you are waiting for the crust to finish, prepare the fruit - slice the apples/apricots/plums or wash the berries.  

Remove from the oven and: 

Top the hot crust with the filling and carefully arrange the fruit in the filling.  I like to fill the tart with raspberries in circles places very close together; as the filling puffs they make a beautiful design.  

Bake about 35-40 minutes until the filling is lightly brown.  Cool and serve - preferably with a little dollop of freshly whipped cream.    

Black Bear Cub Comes Ashore at Gardiner Cennex Station

Whew!  It's been a big day here.  First the high water (talk of the town) and now a black bear cub came ashore - in the middle of town.  He climbed a tree and looked about as pathetic as an animal can until, finally, law enforcement held back the crowd long enough to give him an escape route.  It was actually quite dramatic as he emerged soaking wet and his mamma bear was on the other side of the river (upstream about 500 yards) in Yellowstone National Park while he was perched in the top of a small tree just outside the Subway sandwich shop.  We saw many neighbors and friends (word spreads fast in a small town).  In the absence of a movie theatre, this definately passes for Gardiner entertainment!