Road Trip Yellowstone

by Dina Mishev

  Today Martha uses some of her dad’s recipes at her own bakery. There’s fresh (and flaky) linzer torte (a wonderfully crumbly lattice-topped cake usually filled with nuts and jam), zigeuner (a rustic cinnamon-spiced walnut macaroon with its end dipped in semi-sweet dark chocolate), and nussknacker (a decadent, layered tower of roasted hazelnuts and almonds and praline crème atop a flaky butter cookie crust dipped in chocolate). Pair any one of these with the bakery’s cozy atmosphere—barn-red siding, white-trimmed windows, a faded green tin roof, a bright, woody interior, a constantly cranking (at least in winter) wood-burning stove, and a garden (in summer)—and you can’t go wrong. Bonus: The bakery is open Sunday, which is a rarity in this Mormon-dominated area. 40 Depot St., (208) 354-5623, pendlspastries.com

  Today craft beer lovers can’t imagine life without growlers. Rumor has it that the modern-day growler was only born in 1989. It was invented by Otto Brothers Brewery, which is now Victor’s Grand Teton Brewing Company. 430 Old Jackson Hwy., (888) 899-1656, grandtetonbrewing.com

  Rail-Trail

  Much of the Ashton-Tetonia Trail parallels ID 32. But while the highway has significant ascents and descents, the trail doesn’t. There’s a 900-foot elevation difference between the two ends (downhill heading north; uphill heading south). This mild pitch makes sense since the trail is a repurposed train track.

  The idea of turning decommissioned rail corridors into trails started in the Midwest in the 1960s, not that there was any grand plan. Once rail tracks were removed, people naturally began going for walks on the gentle routes. In the winter, people skied on them. Today there are more than 1,500 miles of rail-trails in the United States used annually by 100 million people. The Ashton-Tetonia Trail might be one of the most scenic rail-trails in the country.

  The 10-foot-wide trail with a packed gravel surface winds through potato fields, small riparian areas, stands of aspen, and over three historic trestle bridges. The Teton Range towers in the background on this ride from Ashton to Tetonia. Trail info: www.traillink.com/trail/ashton-tetonia-trail; bike rental: Fitzgerald’s Bicycles, 20 Cedron Rd., Victor, (208) 787-2453, www.fitzgeraldsbicycles.com

  Mesa Falls and Scenic Byway

  “I visited Mesa Falls before it was anything,” says Sue McKenna, who has worked for the US Forest Service at Mesa Falls since 1997. She moved from Chicago to Idaho in 1974, “the year Nixon resigned,” she says. “I fell in love with all of it. It was all so different than anything I was used to. I had certainly never met a cowboy in my entire life.”

  McKenna says Mesa Falls was a hidden gem when she started working there. “Summer weekends now, we’re jamming.” She thinks this is great. “The falls are just so awesome and spectacular,” she says. “There is a rainbow next to the falls every morning until about one in the afternoon when the sun’s angle changes. Another thing that is so astonishing is that you can get so close to them with the walkway. It feels like you can reach out and touch them, although you can’t. People tell us it’s better than Yellowstone. I think they say that because we’re not as crowded as Yellowstone and in Yellowstone you can’t get as close.”

  While both falls are impressive, the ten-story Upper Mesa Falls steals the show. The falls are about 116 feet tall and 200 feet wide. These two waterfalls are the last big waterfalls on the Snake River unaffected by human influences. The Mesa Falls Scenic Byway is between Ashton and Island Park, (208) 524-7500, www.fs.usda.gov

  LOCAL LOWDOWN KIM KEELEY, Owner of Victor Emporium

  Kim Keeley moved to Victor from Jackson in 1997. “I realized I could buy a house here for what I was paying in rent or build one,” she says. Having been a fishing guide since 1991, Keeley was familiar with the Victor Emporium. “I’d meet clients there all the time,” she says. But she never imagined she’d own the historic general store.

  Life as a fishing guide eventually began to wear on her. Kim remembers waiting for a client at the Emporium one September “and complaining about how much my back hurt,” to her friend and longtime owner of the Emporium, Bob Meyer. Meyer told Keeley the Emporium was for sale. “‘Why don’t you buy it?’ he asked me,” Keeley recalls. She talked to Kathryn Ferris, another longtime friend who had experience in retail, about a partnership. Ferris said “yes,” and the pair began talking to banks. They couldn’t get a loan though. “I told Bob we had no money and he had us put together a proposal and they ended up owner-financing us,” Keeley says. “Otherwise there is no way we could have bought it. They took a big risk on us.” That was in 2000.

  Keeley and Harris still own the Emporium and are still friends.

  In her guiding days, Keeley would get a milkshake almost every day—Victor Emporium is famous for its huckleberry shakes. When she was a regular, it was always huckleberry (there are a couple of dozen other flavors available), unless raspberries were in season. “When they had fresh raspberries, I’d do a huckleberry/raspberry combo,” she says.

  These days, Keeley says, “Being around ice cream so much, I don’t hork down a shake a day anymore. I only occasionally have a little.”

  VICTOR EMPORIUM

  You can buy fishing tackle at Victor Emporium. And Patagonia jackets and base layers. And postcards, stickers, T-shirts, sunglasses, and sunscreen. But it’s the Emporium’s thick huckleberry milkshakes that bring the most people in the door. Every summer, the store goes through 400 gallons of huckleberries, all picked locally. “We don’t even put an ad in the paper telling people we’re buying huckleberries,” says co-owner Kim Keeley. “The tradition was there before we bought the store.” Keeley says people come to them. “We buy a gallon from some people, but there are people who dedicate 6 weeks of their summer to following the huckleberries around and come in with so much.” For decades, people have tried to cultivate huckleberries, but no one’s been successful. They only grow in the wild.

  The single busiest day for huckleberry shakes is always the Fourth of July. “We’ve done 900 that day,” Keeley says. “The average summer day is more like 400.” Huckleberry is by far the number 1 flavor. “Chocolate is second and then we have the Muddy River and the TNT, which are both popular but way down the line from huckleberry.”

  Since Keeley and co-owner Kathryn Harris bought the store in 2000, they’ve added items including a selection of novelty stuff, which they ingeniously display on the wall by the shake counter, where, because every shake is made by hand, you usually end up waiting for several minutes.

  “My favorite is the emergency underwear,” Kim says. “It’s practical and funny at the same time.” 45 S. Main St., (208) 787-2221, www.facebook.com/VictorEmporium

  LOCAL LOWDOWN BRADLY J. BONER, Photographer

  “I’m a history buff, especially for the American West,” says Brad Boner, a longtime Teton Valley resident. Boner is also the chief photographer for the Jackson Hole News & Guide and the photographer and author of the book Yellowstone National Park: Through the Lens of Time, which includes 104 photographs he took in the same locations where William Henry Jackson took his 107 iconic images during the 1871 Hayden Expedition to Yellowstone. Jackson’s images are a large part of why Yellowstone was made a national park. “I wondered if someone had ever gone back to Yellowstone and re-created the photos of the scenes that Jackson had captured.” Boner discovered that no one had. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I took the project on myself.”

  Boner spent months researching the images Jackson had taken. “Surprisingly there was no published single volume of Jackson’s photos,” he says. He then spent three summers between 2011 and 2014 finding the exact spots Jackson had captured with his 8×10 plate-size camera and taking the same photos. “I went into it without expectations; I wanted to be as objective as possible,” says Boner. “I would say that for the most part things are strikingly similar to how they looked in 1871. There are a few places where you can now see roads, bridges, or a little bit of development, but there were places where individual trees and rocks still sat in the same place as when Jackson photo
graphed the scene in 1871. These places where minute details matched up, I’d kind of get goose bumps. You really felt like you were looking right into the past.” Yellowstone National Park: Through the Lens of Time is available in bookstores around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and also on amazon.com.

  Q: What was the first of Jackson’s photographs that you re-created?

  BRADLY BONER: It was in the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. A view of the Lower Falls.

  Q: Do you remember how you felt starting out on this project?

  BB: I remember driving up to Yellowstone to start and being excited. I was embarking on this adventure and I had it in my head that I was going to do this and follow through.

  Q: Was there ever a time when you doubted your ability to finish?

  BB: It was frustrating when I realized it was going to take more time and effort than one summer to do it the way I wanted it to be done—I’m nit-picky and I was waiting sometimes in certain locations for the right light or conditions similar to Jackson’s photos. I never thought about stopping.

  Q: Which images were the most difficult to re-create?

  BB: The ones up on the Mirror Plateau, at Mirror Lake. Mirror Lake is one of the most remote areas in the park. We were hiking without trails for a long time, and we got into areas that had burned in 1988 and had to hopscotch through dead lodgepole that were like giant matchsticks someone had thrown down on the landscape. I did a 10-day canoe trip around Lake Yellowstone to re-photograph all of his lake images.

  Q: How has this project changed your photography?

  BB: This Yellowstone project is a little bit of an anomaly for me. I’m not a nature photographer or a landscape photographer. This project forced me into that part of photography. As a photojournalist, I capture the moment. I’ve been forced to slow down and take the scene into consideration. What this place has done for my photography in general is that it’s really challenged me to be a reflection of the community I cover. Everything about this area—the landscape, the wildlife, the people—is unique. I have a real sense of duty to make a true and accurate reflection of that community.

  Q: What’s a great place to get a guaranteed great image of the Tetons?

  BB: That’s easy. The drive up to Grand Targhee. You can’t miss it, especially in the evening.

  LOCAL LOWDOWN MELISSA ALDER AND KELLI HART, Owners of Freeheel and Wheel

  Melissa Alder and Kelli Hart became friends their freshman year at the University of Montana in Missoula. “We lived near each other in the dorm,” Melissa says. That was in the early 1990s. They stayed friends through college, both working in Kelli’s parents’ fly-fishing shop in West Yellowstone for a couple of summers. Melissa learned to Nordic ski. In 1996, the two opened Freeheel and Wheel, West Yellowstone’s first shop that specialized in Nordic skiing gear. In the time since Freeheel and Wheel opened, West Yellowstone has become a world-class Nordic ski destination. “The advantage is that we get snow early and we keep snow for the entire winter,” Melissa says.

  West Yellowstone made it onto die-hard Nordic skiers’ radar in the late 1970s, and it was in the 1980s that Rendezvous Ski Trails became a community trail system. In the early to mid-1980s, local Doug Edgerton began building equipment specific to grooming Nordic ski trails. Today his company, Yellowstone Track Systems, sells grooming equipment to Nordic ski areas around the world. It’s still based in West Yellowstone, but Doug no longer paints the equipment on his living room floor, like he did in 1984. By the late 1980s, an annual lowkey early-season gathering of Nordic racers from around the West, called Fall Camp, had become a must-do for serious racers. Today Fall Camp, always held Thanksgiving weekend, is the Yellowstone Ski Festival. It draws 3,500 Nordic skiers from across the country.

  Melissa, Kelli, and Freeheel and Wheel have been in West Yellowstone for much of this. “When we first opened, we were looked at as sort of a threat,” Melissa says. In the 1990s, before there were rules about snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park, snowmobiling ruled West Yellowstone. “The snowmobile crowd was reluctant to accept us. But over the course of time, people realized it wasn’t our intention to convert snowmobilers into skiers.” Within 5 years of Freeheel and Wheel opening, the West Yellowstone Chamber of Commerce hired a full-time staffer to promote and coordinate Nordic skiing and other “quiet” outdoor recreation opportunities (like running and biking). “The number of skiers has grown roughly 10 to 20 percent per year,” Melissa says. And snowmobilers still have 400 miles of their own groomed trails in the area.

  Nordic skiers aren’t flocking to West Yellowstone only for its early and consistent snow, but for Rendezvous Trails’s 35 kilometers of groomed trails. Doug is still the one who grooms them, at least when he’s not working as chief of course preparation at an event like the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics. He has consulted on the grooming for Nordic events at every Olympics since 2002.

  “The Rendezvous Trails are great for all levels of skiers,” Melissa says. “We have Olympians who train on them and people from Florida who are 70 and have never skied before.”

  While “we love the winter,” Melissa says, the shop turns into a bike center come summer. Long before she learned to Nordic ski, Melissa was a bike mechanic and raced mountain bikes. Freeheel and Wheel has a coffee bar inside the shop that’s the same regardless of the season; espresso beans are locally roasted by Morning Glory Coffee & Tea. 33 Yellowstone Ave., (406) 646-7744, www.freeheelandwheel.com

  Moose Creek Ranch

  “They’re really cute as a bug,” says Jeanette Beard, the manager of Moose Creek Ranch outside of Victor of the ranch’s “glamping” cabins. “There are lots of people who want to camp but are tired from traveling, so they don’t really want to camp.” The solution: the ranch’s five wood-sided cabin-tents. They don’t have indoor plumbing, but each has a queen-size bed, battery-powered lanterns, and a woodstove. Moose Creek burbles by close enough for you to hear it. In the fall, you might hear a bugling elk too. If you don’t even want to pretend to camp, Moose Creek Ranch also has regular cabins with private bathrooms. Wherever you stay, “the nice thing about the ranch is that it’s only 1½ miles off the highway. We’re the only thing on our road and it feels like you’ve gone 15 miles away from civilization,” Jeanette says. “There’s no highway noise and you walk out the front door and you can ride, hike, snowshoe—do everything active that the Tetons are known for.” 2733 E. 10800 South, (208) 787-6078, www.moosecreekranch.com

  ROAD TRIP 4 THE WILLIAMSBURG OF THE WEST

  In the 1860s, Nevada City and Virginia City were two of nine towns that sprang up along Alder Gulch after gold was discovered there. As quickly as the area boomed though, it busted. Virginia City’s population peaked at around 10,000 residents in the mid-1860s, but by the 1880s, only 200 residents remained. Nevada City was down to less than fifty people. Today roughly 140 people live in the area and tens of thousands of people visit to experience life in a Victorian-era mining town. Between them, Virginia City and Nevada City have over 200 historic buildings that are an interactive open-air museum managed by the Montana Heritage Commission. The buildings include everything from a general mercantile to a vaudeville theater, arcade, and music hall. There’s a shop that sells homemade ice cream, too.

  Nevada City Music Hall

  You wouldn’t expect to find the biggest music organ in the world in a Montana ghost town. Yet, there it is sitting in the Nevada City Music Hall—an 89-key Gavioli fairground organ almost the size of a house. And it’s just one of the pieces in what is possibly the largest public collection of automated music machines in North America. There are also three Wurlitzer band organs, a Wurlitzer theater organ, and a machine in which mechanical fingers play a real violin. And all of these work, if you’ve got the chance to make them play.

  The Butte Piano Company was once the largest dealer of Seeburgs and Violanos outside of Chicago, so there were quite a few player pianos in the surrounding area. Charles Bovey, the son of the president of General Mills, began collec
ting player pianos in 1946, about 2 decades after they’d fallen out of fashion. By this time, the Butte Piano Company, like Butte itself, was in decline. When Charles began looking around Butte for automated music machines to add to his collection, most of what he found still worked, most likely because of Montana’s lack of humidity.

  Charles found a Seeburg-G player piano, with its two sets of organ pipes and a set of drums, at the Lime Quarry Inn, west of Anaconda. Then there was the Seeburg-J, with its dome made from stained glass designed to look like the US Capitol. That came from the Montana State Prison.

  LOCAL LOWDOWN BILL KOCH, Co-Manager of the Virginia City Players

  Bill Koch has worked for the Virginia City Players off and on since 1985. He and his wife, Christina, most recently took over managing the company in 2012 and have a 20-year contract with the Montana Heritage Commission, which owns the Virginia City Opera House. The first hour of every show is a classic melodrama—Bill or Christina writes the script. After a short intermission, there’s a 45-minute vaudeville act. “We perform a variety over the summer,” Bill says. “We try to do a classic horror show, and then a full-blown fantasy or comedy during the month of July when all the kids are out of school and then we try a murder mystery. The vaudeville part changes every month.”