Meet the Owners

In talking to real estate agents, after telling them our list of desires for our ranch, most would chuckle and say “wow, you’re looking for the perfect ranch… Good luck finding it!” In Sun Valley, Idaho, the real estate agent there mentioned that we may want to look in North Central Idaho. So we looked on the map and it appeared to be really remote we were afraid that it may be further from “civilization” that we wanted. From Sun Valley we traveled to Bend, Oregon and looked at a ranch there and were then planning on going to Big Sky, Montana, and noticed that one of the routes we could take would take us through North Central Idaho. So we decided to stop in Grangeville for a couple of days and take a look.

Once we arrived in Grangeville I went to the store to pick up some groceries and the first thing I noticed when I pulled into the parking lot was that most of the vehicles had their windows down (it was a warm August day). A peek inside revealed that most of the vehicles had the keys in their ignition! You certainly can’t do that in any big cities. Once inside the store, I could hear the employees of the store asking customers about their families and referring to each other by their first names. I kind of felt like we had stepped back in time to a movie set in the 1950s. I immediately felt that this was the type of community we had been looking for. So I went looking for a real estate agent to see if we could also find the perfect ranch.

After looking at one ranch with the agent we explained what we liked and didn’t like about that particular property and described our perfect ranch. He told us that he knew of a ranch that wasn’t on the market, but was owned by a group of cattle ranchers who were getting older and may have interest in selling it. He got us permission to go out and explore the ranch and we went the following day.

The route we took to the ranch was through miles of pastureland, pretty flat with a few rolling hills, and we were getting discouraged on the drive out thinking that this was going to be another unexciting ranch, but when we drove down the final stretch to the ranch the world just seemed to open up. The ground fell away into miles of canyons, surrounded by mountain ranges, pine forests, and we were stunned by the beauty. The real estate agent had brought a side-by-side atv so we could go around the property and explore. We took this down into the canyon and we fell in love with the property. After traveling through thirteen states and viewing dozens of ranches, nothing we had seen even came close to matching the beauty of this ranch.

At this point we knew we wanted it, but since it wasn’t on the market, we had to come up with a price ourselves in order to make an offer. The more we explored the ranch the higher that figure kept getting in our heads. We really wanted this ranch, nothing else out there compared. We finally decided on an offer that was slightly higher than what we had agreed that we would spend on a ranch and sent it to them. And then the waiting began. The ranch was owned by five cattle ranchers who bought it in 1956. The five ranchers were split on whether or not they wanted to sell. Eventually three of the five voted to accept my offer, and we were informed that our offer was accepted. Once our offer was accepted, our first purchase was a Polaris Ranger so we could explore the ranch we had just bought and we found many cool areas of the ranch that we had no idea existed when we bought it – we were thrilled with what we found!

And now the work began! The property itself was amazing, but the ranching part was very run down. The fences were in bad shape and there were four old barns that looked ready to collapse. We moved onto the property and continued to live in the 5th wheel while we began construction on our shop and began dismantling the old barns and cleaning up the property. We salvaged the old barn wood and have used it in various places, including quite a bit in our bar area at the lodge as well as all the baseboards and other trim in the lodge.

While the shop was still in the process of being completed, we had an exceptionally cold New Years Eve and our water lines in our 5th wheel froze up and we decided to move the 5th wheel into the shop to warm it up, which we did on New Years Day 2016. We continued to live in the 5th wheel inside the shop while construction on the shop and small “temporary” living quarters were built in the shop. Once the shop was completed we moved into our temporary “shouse” (shop/house), little did we know at the time that it wouldn’t be until nearly three years later before our house was finished.

We started construction on all sorts of things – over three years we built our shop, a greenhouse, our fuel station, a poultry barn, a horse and hay barn, three cabins, and our lodge, skeet and sporting clays ranges and much more. We took miles of rough trails and improved them into county style gravel roads for easy access around the ranch in all weather conditions. Repaired fences, took some fences out and put some new ones in. It was literally over three years of non-stop seven day a week construction. It wasn’t until the lodge was finished that we finally decided on a floorplan and location for our house and we began construction on it in early 2018 and we were able to move in in November. After four years of living in a 5th wheel and then our shouse, we were super excited to finally live in our permanent home.

Since leaving the Caribbean in search of our perfect ranch to finding the ranch and then converting it into the ranch of our dreams it has been a lot of hard work, but we are at the point now where we can look at what we have created with pride and we are able to enjoy the fruits of our labors. We absolutely love where we live. It was a tough journey, but well worth it!

You are invited to come visit our ranch as our guest and enjoy the fabulous place we call home.

Scott can be contacted at [email protected].