Cooking in the West

The early rifle season elk hunters headed into the back country this week, and there is a chill of fall in the air. I heard a bull elk bugle last night, and my heart longs for hunting camp, but my "town job" and my aching joints remind me that I probably better leave the wilderness camp cooking to the next generation. Nevertheless, I find myself thinking back over thousands of great memories of almost twenty years of camp cooking for Brett and Julie Todd at the K Lazy Three. Sure, there were ten below nights, getting up at 2:30 a.m. in hunting season, hauling buckets of water up steep creek banks, cooking fresh from the elk heart while trying to prepare a turkey dinner, but when I think back, only the great memories have stuck.

I think it was my first K Lazy 3 Women's Ride pack trip when an incident happened that showed me how Brett could remain calm under pressure. Mounting and dismounting are where most accidents happen on the trail. In fact, in Brett's famous safety talk, which he gives before any guest ever mounts a horse, he concludes with a demonstration on safe mounting and dismounting. His final statement regarding not following proper dismounting procedure is always, "And if your foot gets caught in that stirrup, you are going to die." As you might have guessed, he is a direct person.

So, we arrived at the Meadow Creek camp, which is a 14 mile ride from the trailhead. Most of the ladies had been rearranging themselves in the saddle for the last couple of hours, so they were anxious to get off and restore feeling to their lower extremities. One rather well-endowed rider leaned forward over the saddle horn as she attempted to carefully dismount safely according to Brett's explicit directions, but somehow she hooked the underwire on her foundation garment over the saddle horn. She was not hung up in the stirrup, but she was definitely hung up. Brett spied her dangling off her side stepping horse and started towards her saying, "Woah, Sailor. Woah, Sailor!" Fortunately, Sailor was quite bombproof, so he passed fairly slowly while Brett lifted her up high enough to clear her lingerie from the saddle horn and set her down safely beside Sailor. Being a man of relatively few words, he said nothing. He just started unsaddling her horse.

Guy Gravert, packer and guide, was along on almost every trip I made into the Scapegoat. He told me the first time I met him that the job description of the cook is, "The cook rides in the back and gets two buckets of water when we hit camp." Over the years, the crew of the K Lazy 3 played many practical jokes on each other. One day after lunch, Guy said he was still hungry, so I dug in my saddle bag and gave him the rest of my lunch. At dinner that evening, he began jokingly complaining about the quality control of the cook, because in his bonus lunch, one of the cookies I had given him had a bite taken out of it. So, in the cook tent that night, the hunters and I decided we would take a bite out of everything in Guy's lunch for tomorrow. We did not actually bite into his sandwich or cookies or fruit, but we used a knife to make very respectable bite marks. Fortunately, the hunters were clued in, because the next day before lunch, one of Guy's hunters missed a huge bull elk, and Guy was so upset that he began devouring his lunch without even noticing the bite marks painstakingly cut out of everything. One of his hunters decided to tell him, so all of our creative pranking efforts would not have been in vain.

Guy provided some stock for the K Lazy 3, and one year he brought a big draft cross three year old that he was sure was gentle enough for the cook to ride, because his four year old son had been riding him. About 200 yards from the trailhead, a dog shot out from under a bridge on the trail right behind us, and Chip threw me higher than I have ever flown in any unplanned dismount. Fortunately, when I landed, a large shrub broke my fall or I would have been broken into a million places. I don't think I was on the ground very long, but when I tried to get up, I couldn't because Brett had leaped off his horse and was holding me down. He was sure I was paralyzed, so he wasn't going to let me move until I assured him that all of my moving parts were still capable of movement. Guy felt so bad that he carried my two buckets of water and a lot more for the rest of the trip, and he didn't even protest French toast morning, which he has appetizingly nicknamed "Snotbread Day."

Jerry Yoder is an amazing packer. He packed hundreds of eggs into the Scapegoat for me, and the only ones that were ever broken were ones that fell out of the back of the Suburban at the trailhead. One night when we were camped at the base of the Chinese Wall in the Bob Marshall, the worst summer thunderstorm I have ever seen blew in. Usually the crew slept under the stars or the cook fly, but as the storm blew in, one of the guests invited me to sleep in her tent. I accepted her offer, grabbed my stuff and slept high and dry while poor Jerry and Brett huddled under two folding camp tables and spent the night completely soaked. I felt guilty but much better than I would have felt if there would have been three of us under those tables. It took me the entire next day to get all of their clothes, gear, and sleeping bags dried out. Jerry jokingly complained about my giant outfitter bag and the weight of my duffel on every trip, but he pretended not to notice when I slipped forbidden items like paper plates into the pack boxes.

I had the privilege of watching the wilderness and Brett mold several boys into fine young men. Gary Todd, Brandon Cirrincione, Jesse Bainter, Logan Brandt, and Seth Schubert went to the K Lazy 3 School of Mule Packing and Life, and came out prepared for almost anything. There were no lectures. All lessons were hands on, days were long, responsibility was high, but they still had time for shenanigans like hiding the senile cook's raspberries from her. Brett paid by the day, and the standing joke was that if you did not get your work done in a day and had to work into the next day, you would be docked for doing the previous day's work the next day.

Working behind the scenes, Julie Todd could organize and orchestrate the food, gear, and details for as many as three simultaneous hunting camps out of two different trailheads, and I don't think she ever forgot anything we needed. The first night in every camp was "Thank God and Julie" night, because she sent a giant lasagna and the world's best rhubarb cake in as wilderness take out food.

All that is left of my tenure at the K Lazy 3 are memories and Brett's timeless farewell, "Shoot straight!"

I would like to share some of my favorite Scapegoat recipes. The Five Hour Rice is another inside joke. On one roving trip, Brett found himself cooking, and he started the rice way too early--by approximately 4.5 hours. Let's just say the fishermen remarked that it had a nice smoky flavor with a somewhat charred aftertaste. The recipe works well if you don't overcook it for several hours!

Brett Todd's Five Hour Rice:

chicken breasts

Rice-a-Roni wild rice mix

mushroom soup

can of mushroom stems and pieces

3/4 C. sour cream

Dredge the seasoned to taste chicken breasts in flour and brown in melted butter. Arrange them in a roaster, cover them, and cook them on top of your stove ("baking" them on the stove top) until your rice is done. Meanwhile, prepare the rice (figure one box per four people) according to the package directions. When the rice is finished add one can of soup, 3/4 C. sour cream, and one small can of mushrooms per each box of rice prepared. When the rice mixture is heated through, you can serve the chicken on top of it for an impressive wilderness

presentation.

Meadow Creek Dump Cake:

1 box white cake mix

1 can crushed pineapple

1 large can cherry pie filling

1.5 sticks of butter

Put the can of undrained pineapple and the pie filling in the bottom of a 9 X 13 pan. Try to declump the cake mix, and spread it evenly over the fruit. Cut the butter sticks into pats and arrange the pats all over the top of the cake. Bake at 350 degrees (or whatever temperature your camp oven bakes at, which is often somewhere between 175 and 600 degrees) for about 40 minutes until the top is golden brown. Try to serve warm, and maybe even make the mules pack in a little cream to whip up!

Heart Attack Bars:

(Brett would advise his guests that if they felt they were going to have a heart attack, they should find a large log and bend over it, so their corpse would be easier to pack out over a mule when rigor mortis set in.)

5 1/2 C. Rice Krispies

40 large marshmallows

1/4 C. butter

1.5 C. peanut butter

1 pkg. milk chocolate chips

1 pkg. butterscotch chips

King size bag of M and M's

Heat marshmallows and butter in a frying pan on the stove until they melt. Stir in peanut butter. Pour Rice Krispies in a 9 X 13 greased pan, and stir in marshmallow mixture. Pat into the pan. Melt the two kinds of chips together in a frying pan and pour over the bars. Sprinkle the top with M and M's. Cut into bars when chocolate is set.