Unexpected Beauty

It was not a dark and stormy night but a damp and chilly afternoon at the High Mountain Lodge. Who knew that the sun, obliterated by the clouds, still had enough gumption to turn the brown, dead fields into gold this afternoon....

Frequently it gets so staggeringly beautiful up here that you wonder if the Chamber of Commerce has a contract with some hideously expensive Hollywood special-effects company--as if the Winter Park/Fraser Valley C of C had enough money to conspire with the Big Boys to turn the valley spectacular at any season--including our current slow time....

Not that the Big Boys could pull this one off. They don't have enough imagination.

We live in a place where nature's gestures are overly large and embarrassingly dramatic. The clouds that in any other place would soar overhead, unreachable, here drizzle down the valleys like spilled buttermilk looking for a low place to sour the floorboards in the kitchen.

And, if the sights don't sock you in the eye, the smells in our valley would put a Paris perfumery to shame. Fallen wet aspen leaves have an indescribable dark aphrodisiacal musk to them. It doesn't take much for them to rot and become soil, but in the magical few weeks after they've given up dazzling our vision with their incomparable fall color and fallen to the ground, they ravage our nose instead of our eyes.

It's no wonder all the large mammals lose their minds this time of year. The elk go into rut and start to bugle; the foxes down in the willows scream at the drop of the hat; the moose do creepy moosey-rut things like destroying outhouses; and the coyotes, lordy, the coyotes behave like freshman frat boys having their first kegger.

When everything seems to be dying, the animals give the lie to the season. This is one of the most fertile times of the year. The colder it gets up here, the more life deepens, and when the snow is an even blanket hiding all that life, we'll be skiing on our future spring.

Curse you, Marie Callender!

Yesterday in the late afternoon when I was relaxing from doing one of the innumerable chores around the Lodge, I took a break to watch Stupid TV. I don't know what channel it was or what the program was about: it was TV, and hence, stupid.

But I do remember that between episodes, most of the commercials were about food. There was the inevitable ad about that KFC sandwich that doesn't have bread (NB: I actually broke down in shame and ordered and ate one of them. Neither the flavor nor the grease justify the guilt factor. Skip this one.) Then the ads segued to pizza. But I met my waterloo when the ads for Marie Callender's chicken pot pies came on the TV.

"Curse you, Marie Callender!" I shrieked at the top of my lungs (though the imperative verb I used wasn't "curse"). I was so hungry and those pies looked so good. But instead of driving to the Safeway and buying one of her damned Chicken Pot Pies, I decided to make my own.

Here's my recipe:

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F

Crust:

You will need a deep-dish pie plate. If you don't have one, get one. Glass is good.

Put 2 cups flour and a teaspoon of salt in a food processor equipped with the pastry blade; Turn it on.

Gradually add 2 sticks (1/2 lb) butter, cut into manageable pats--about 1-2 tbsp each, and dropped individually through the feeding tube of the processor.

After you've added all the butter, process until the mixture is thoroughly incorporated. It will look like corn meal. If you're not from the south and have never seen cornmeal, think a crumbly mixture of flour and butter.

Gradually add about 1/4 cup of very cold water. Process on pulse. The water should encourage the flour/butter mixture to form a ball.

Stop processing and, after removing the pastry blade from the machine, scoop the dough out onto plastic wrap. Chill in the fridge for at least one hour before rolling out.

Sauce

Microwave or otherwise heat to scalding 2-3 cups of milk. Hold at temperature.

Melt in a medium saucepan 1/4 lb (1 stick) of butter.

When the butter is bubbling, gradually stir in enough flour to form a bubbly paste in the bottom of the pan. It will take 1/4 and 1/2 cup of flour. You basically want a mixture that holds together on the bottom of the saucepan and makes you wonder if you added too much flour. Let the mixture cook for at least a minute or so (this is so the flour will cook and the sauce won't taste like that nasty milk gravy you had at your aunt's house last Thanksgiving). Then sloooowly add the hot milk, whisking it into the butter/flour (snooty cooks call it a "roux") mixture.

The sauce will dramatically thicken almost immediately. Add a very finely diced medium onion, or 2 tablespoons of dried onion to the sauce. Grate half a clove of nutmeg into the sauce. Correct the seasoning for salt--it will probably take at least a teaspoon.

Throw in 1 bay leaf and stir into the sauce. Let the sauce rest. Don't forget to fish the bayleaf out before you proceed with the recipe, or one of your guests will have a nasty surprise.

Final Prep


Sauté 3 chicken thighs or 2 chicken breasts in a butter/olive oil mixture. When done through but not dry, cut into small cubes. Add to sauce.

Microwave 2 cups of mixed frozen vegetables. Add them to the sauce. Don't worry about excess moisture.

Get the dough out of the fridge. Divide into two parts.

Roll out the 1st piece of dough to about 1/8 inch in thickness and line the bottom of the baking dish. Ignore the overhanging dough for now. (For an extra-crispy bottom crust, paint the bottom of the pie pan with melted butter before lining it with the crust.)

HINT: The easiest way to roll out pie crust is on a pastry cloth (think a linen or cotton dish towel that's been rubbed well with flour). After rolling the dough out to the proper thickness, position your rolling pin at the edge of the dough, then using the pastry cloth, drape the dough over the rolling pin. Then roll the dough (minus the pastry cloth) onto the pin. You can then unroll the dough into the pie pan with a minimal amount of grief.

Pour the sauce/chicken/veggie mixture into the dish.

Roll out and cover the pie with the top crust.

Trim and make look pretty. Pierce the top crust to allow steam to escape.

Cooking

Place the pie in the preheated 425-degree oven on a baking sheet for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, decrease oven temperature to 325-degrees and bake for 50 minutes.

Let the pie rest for a few minutes before serving, but don't forget to salute Marie Callendar when you cut into it.

Commentary

The pie crust is really the secret here, and food processors are the secret weapon. If you don't have one, you can use the old "cut the butter into the flour using two knives in a scissor motion," or you can use a pastry masher. My mother used the latter, and you could have taken her pie dough out of the bowl, rolled it out, then sewn the pieces up into shoes that would hold together better than leather.  For all I know, that's what they did during the Depression to keep children shod. But the food processor keeps the butter/flour mixture filled with air, so that when the butter melts into the flour during cooking, the result is thin flakes of tender crusty goodness.

The sauce is a classic béchamel--basically gravy with an attitude.

Instead of frozen mixed veggies, you can add just about any fresh veggies you want: broccoli or broccolini both work well. If you use fresh vegetables, nuke 'em until they are are tender and then dice them coarsely before adding them to the sauce. If you don't have a microwave, then steam the veggies. Whatever you do, DO NOT BOIL THEM. That's just wrong, and it sucks all the goodness out of the veggies.

Enjoy!

Suede comes to the High Mountain Lodge

Long before we were married, I knew that Julie loved horses. After we got married 28+ years ago, she had a horse for a while that she kept in stables and pastures close to our old house in Golden. However, the struggles to be a family and raise a son made it hard for her to follow her passion, and she eventually had to postpone that dream; there were many times when she wondered if it would ever be fulfilled.

Most of our marriage has been about me pursuing my goals, though over the years we did talk (sometimes very heatedly) about what the future would look like when it was "her turn." And I promised her many, many times that someday it would, indeed, be "her turn." So when I got laid off in 2008, and after a few months it became evident that the economy wasn't going to let me go out and "get another job" as I'd always been able to do in the past, we began exploring all those fantasies about what our future life might look like that we'd played with over the years.

It was a fluke that we hit upon the idea of running a Bed & Breakfast. Julie's aunt and uncle had run one for a few years in North Carolina, and we'd toyed with the idea of having one as a "stepdown" to retirement, but in the constellation of our retirement fantasies, it didn't really stand out among all the others. But on the way home from spending one of our unemployed weekends at the family cabin in the mountains, we drove past a motel overlooking the Continental Divide that we'd always joked about looking into buying if it ever came on the market.

Low and behold, there was a For Sale sign out front. We wrote down the number, called the listing agent, and a few days later, had a showing. We really liked the place, but as we were debriefing afterwards in a little roadhouse we were fond of, it became clear that, if we were going to follow the innkeeping path, we would have to acquire some skills and knowledge we didn't currently possess. Low and behold, in the lobby of the roadhouse was a Denver Free University catalog and one of the courses offered was, you guessed it, "So You Want To Own a B&B."

Long story short, we took the class, and the teachers, Becky and Roxanne, became our real estate brokers, and they ultimately negotiated the sale of the High Mountain Lodge for us.

But lordy, did we drag them through a few knotholes before we bought the place. As we began looking for an inn to buy, we began to clarify what we wanted. "Where will we put our books?" was one of our early mantras. "You have too many books," Roxanne told me. "Get rid of them. They clutter up the owner's quarters, and potential buyers have trouble imagining their own stuff there."

"We haven't even bought a place yet, and already you're working on helping us sell it?"

She narrowed her eyes. "It's never too early to plan."

Then after they started filtering our searches for books, we saw a place we really liked. "But where will we put the piano?" Julie asked.

"What piano?" asked Roxanne through gritted teeth.

"Oh, the 7-foot antique Steinway in the parlor," said Julie.

Roxanne muttered something, but I didn't catch what she said.

Then we saw the High Mountain Lodge. "Oh, Tom!" Julie exclaimed. "Look at those pastures! There's even a place for the horses!"

"What horses?" Roxanne demanded shrilly, the pitch of her voice inching upward. "You don't have horses! Do you?" Becky tried to shush her.

"Not yet," said Julie sweetly.

It was then that I realized that Julie's "turn," so long postponed, was about to take place.

The first year at the Lodge, we didn't have a moment to spare to think about acquiring a horse. We were too busy cleaning and decorating and cleaning some more, all the while figuring out how to be innkeepers and welcome the wonderful people who began to visit the lodge.

Then earlier this summer, it became clear that we weren't going to have time to do the prep work to get a horse; we didn't have time to get the fences in order, and it was clear that horses would have to wait another year.

That was before our neighbor approached us a few weeks ago and offered to give us a 3-year-old Rocky Mountain Horse mare named Suede. I almost fell out of my chair, I was so surprised. Suede has a club foot and so, though she is from champion bloodlines that helped establish the breed, she can't be shown and shouldn't be bred. But she's a sweet little girl, and she now belongs to Julie.

Julie is overjoyed and is busy plotting how we can get our son and his 20-something friends up to help us with a fence-building party sometime before the snow flies. "I knew God was going to give me a horse," she noted. "I just didn't know when or what kind of horse it was going to be.

So now, we know.

The Best Things To Do While Staying at the High Mountain Lodge

• Take a deep breath, listen to the silence, and let yourself slow down;
• Get some carrots from Julie and walk down and feed them to the horses;
• Drive into town and breathe in the view of the Indian Peaks and the Continental Divide as you round the curve;
• Weather permitting, drive up into Rocky Mountain National Park. If Trail Ridge Road is open, start early in the morning and plan to stop frequently to take in the views and see the varied wildlife. Be sure to stop at the Visitor's Center at the top (11,796 ft/3595m elevation). Good luck with breathing up there. Then drive down into Estes Park for lunch. Turn around and repeat the process. Stop in Grand Lake and have dinner overlooking the water.
• Sit on the deck of the High Mountain Lodge with a refreshing drink and watch the sun set in a blaze of color over Sheep Mountain;
• After a day of skiing, hiking, mountain biking, fishing, or a round of golf, relax in the jetted hot tub, sauna, or swimming pool in our enclosed Atrium;
• Drive into town for a day of shopping, dining, and people- and dog-watching;
• Sample the award-winning vintages at the Winter Park Winery;
• In the summer bike the ski runs at Winter Park or the over 300 miles of area trails, from gentle rolling paths with jaw-dropping views of the high peaks to demanding double-diamond trails that will have the most daredevil adrenaline junkie squealing like a little girl;
• Stroll, cross-country ski, or snowshoe around our pasture at the High Mountain Lodge. Venture through the willows to find the secret picnic tables along Crooked Creek and have a quiet meal with your best friend with only the high mountain peaks watching;
• Let your inner foodie run wild over breakfast; savor a perfectly made espresso, cappucino, latte, or macchiato so good it would have an Italian barista weeping in envious rage; 
• Share the High Mountain Lodge with those you love: your friends, your lover, your children or grandchildren; even your four-footed friend;
• Ski or Ride Winter Park and Mary Jane--one of the nation's premier snow resorts--then come back to the High Mountain Lodge and tell us about your adventures. We'll even tell you our favorite secret runs and how to get there.

Attack of the Killer Ceiling Fans

The High Mountain Lodge does not have air-conditioning. At 8,700 feet in elevation, even at the height of summer, it is not unusual for the temperatures to drop into the 40s at night, and by August, we are warning guests at the Lodge to watch their step in the morning going across the multi-tiered deck to the dining lodge so they won't slip on the frost coating the boards.

It's a different world up here--even from Denver. When the city is baking in 90+ or triple digit temperatures, we consider it a heat wave if the mercury hits 80. And on the two days this summer it hit 90 on our thermometer in July (courtesy of reflected heat from the deck; the air wasn't nearly that warm), we were willing to believe that there was something to global warming after all.

Instead of air conditioning the High Mountain Lodge has ceiling fans in every room. On warm summer nights, guests can open their windows and doors, and the fans will circulate the air and mix it with the outside breezes. Lodge guests, particularly those from lower elevations and hot climes, tend to underestimate the chill in the air. 

(Someone remind me to blog about the frigid June wedding Julie and I attended on the shores of the (frozen) lake just below the summit of Mt. Evans when it was 98 in Denver. We weren't married then, but our memory of the misery we went through sort of put the kabosh on any fantasy about getting married outside in a Colorado mountain meadow.) 

No matter how many times we point out the extra blanket in every room (and show guests how to turn up the heat in their room), invariably, they will show up for breakfast (in shorts and t-shirts with blue lips) to comment on how COLD it is. 

So when we get the occasional phone inquiry from people in Houston asking if we have air conditioning, because they won't book with us if we don't have air conditioning, we refer them to a couple who are our competitors (who are also our friends) who have put in refrigerated air conditioning in their inn just to assuage the heat-fears of people from Houston.

"How's that working for you?" I ask.

"They complained about how cold it was. I got up after midnight and gave them two extra blankets and suggested they turn off the air conditioning and open the french doors onto their patio. But they were afraid of bugs."

"You didn't tell them that there are no bugs in Grand County?"

"They're from Houston. They figure you're lying to them."

But all of this is a prelude to telling you the story of how we (actually I) suffer from our ceiling fans.

Ceiling fans have metal chains hanging down from them: one to turn on the light, and one to adjust the speed of the rotation of the fan.

At the High Mountain Lodge, some of the fixtures can be controlled from a switch on the wall, and some from the pull chains from the fixtures.

But they all have chains depending from them.

And, God help me, they all attack me.

If the High Mountain Lodge has cooler temperatures, it also has lower humidity and vicious static electricity. When I was a little boy growing up in Oklahoma, it was fun in the wintertime to play the game of "static electricity." You'd shuffle your feet across the wool carpet and sneak up on your mom or dad (usually your mom, because she wasn't as liable to smack you when you touched the metal frame of her glasses and sent huge amounts of volts of electricty coursing through her body). She'd just scream.

But the High Mountain Lodge has low humidity and high static electricity all year long. So maybe the fact that Julie and I own an Inn is a way for me to work off the karmic burden of torturing my parents with static electricity in my childhood.

You see, there are several rooms in the lodge where the chains from the ceiling fans hang down low enough to attack me when I'm making a bed.

You would think that I would have enough sense to avoid them when cleaning a room or making a bed, but I tend to get focused on projects, even if it is only making a bed. 

For the past year, I have had the misfortune to be making a bed and in the course of doing so, back up into the pull-chains from the fixture and experience a "static-electric discharge."

We have one room in particular (it's one of our most popular rooms), where the pull-chains for the lamp/fan fixture hand down just about at a perfect distance to attack me when I'm making the bed. And, I swear, every time I make the bed in that room, the damn fan attacks me. 

Here's the scenario: I get the bottom sheet tight, then I balance the top sheet on the bed so that it's hanging equidistant from the floor on either side of the mattress.

Then I shake out the blanket (which crackles from static electricity) and back up to make sure that it's symmetrical to the bed, and get close enough to the ceiling fixture that the static electricity causes the metal chain to wrap itself around my face and discharge on my cheek just below my eye. 

Then I scream and begin to curse and roar and stagger about like Boris Karloff imitating Frankenstein's monster in the movies and fall over one of the chairs in front of the fireplace. 

Nobody told me that innkeeping involved doing battle with static electricity. 

I wonder if there would be anyway we could get our electrical co-op to suck up the excess static electricity I generate when making beds?

Prolly not. Julie doesn't believe I work all that hard; an electrical utility would demand more evidence than an electrical discharge scar across my face.

September

On the first day of September, it was as if God announced that it was fall. The morning temperature on our thermometer was 35 degrees instead of the 40-50 it had been all summer, there was frost on the decks, and we actually had to turn up the thermostat in the dining room. I was actually proud of the fact that our famous chilled orange juice was staying chilled, but Julie pointed out that if people's lips were too numb to feel the glass when they tried to drink it, they probably wouldn't appreciate it that much. So I capitulated.

During the day, the sun is still warm, but time is hastening toward the equinox this month, and earth's northern hemisphere is turning her face away from the sun. The aspen leaves are beginning to turn, and everything is just about perfect right now.

Winter and all its fun is just around the corner, but we're not there yet. We still have September to enjoy, the most perfect month in the high country. In the evening, guests at the High Mountain Lodge are spending more time in the public areas, then retiring to their rooms to enjoy a fire in their fireplace. Woodsmoke incense is starting to bless the valley.

The weather is quiet in September. The Pacific monsoons have blown themselves out and, barring an ill-behaved hurricane that blows up from the Gulf of Mexico, it will be calm here: warm in the daytime, and crisp at night. Of course even a hurricane does blow up the Gulf and across the southwest, it may make Denver miserable, but probably won't get over the Continental Divide.

A local weather forecaster, who has made something of a name for himself accurately predicting to the inch how much snow will fall on the ski areas in any given day, thinks this is going to be a good year for skiing in northern Colorado, courtesy of the La Niña currently chilling the waters off Chile.

We say, bring it on! Yee-haw! and all that. But not until we've enjoyed our gentle and glorious September.

Fire Weed

Fire weed is a dramatically beautiful plant with striking purple blossoms. Consisting of a long stalk, it flowers sequentially through the summer, with the blossoms climbing higher on the plant as summer progresses. Children in Grand County are said to get sad when the blossoms at the apex of the plant begin to flower, because it is an indication that the beginning of school is imminent.

Fireweed is so-named because it is one of the opportunistic plants that sprout in the forest after a fire. With their tenacious roots, they secure the soil and make it possible for less-vigorous plants subsequently to take root.

After the blossoms reach the top of the plant, you think it's pretty much done for. All that's left are these long narrow tubes. But just when you think the thing is done for and about to die, the tubes split open and begin to release so much fluff that you're sure they could give a cottonwood a run for its money.

Fireweed fluff is a harbinger of fall and a promise of more substantial (and significantly colder) white stuff that pretty soon is going to start falling from the sky and not from ruptured plant stamens.

I wish that the amount of fireweed fluff were a predictor of a good snow season. If that were true, then the High Mountain Lodge (and the Fraser Valley and Winter Park Ski Area) promise to be buried in the skiable and snowshoe-able white stuff this winter.

The other day, Julie said to me, "I am so looking forward to winter! Aren't you?" Well, yeah. After I replace the weather stripping on most of the doors in the lodge. And I really need to take apart our Buick-sized snowblower that has been summering down in the green shed. I'm pretty sure that bad boy is gonna earn his keep starting in just a few months.

We'll be ready. We're looking forward to having winter sports enthusiasts in the lodge. We can hardly wait to get out our own skis and snowshoes.

In the meantime, we'll sit out in the sunshine under the umbrellas on the Lodge decks, watch the wheeling sky that is always different, with the beauty of any one day trying to out-do the day before.

Mind you, we're not it a hurry for it to snow, but the promise of winter has us filled with anticipation.