Tales of Swan Valley outfitters - Rich Nelson & Sharon Lopau

SWAN VALLEY – At the Aug. 3 Upper Swan Valley Historical Society (USVHS) program "Outfitters and Guides" in the Swan Valley, Pat Tabor told about his outfitting days. He almost got side-tracked on cook stories. Tabor said, "I could write a book just on cooks alone, because cooks are a very special breed of individuals."

Rich Nelson, another of the program's speakers, told the cook's side of the story.

The 88-year-old Nelson said he used to cook for General Warren Aken. As Nelson tells it, "The General wanted to be a cowboy and he wanted to take pack trips. I just happened to be around and [the General] said, 'You can be my cook'."

Nelson said, "At the time I didn't realize that wilderness cooks were not too well thought of. Sometimes they said bad words about my cooking."

Having worked as a cook on fishing boats, Nelson was confident in his cooking abilities. As he saw it, the problem was the guests were city folks and quite a bit more finicky than fisher folk. But he quickly learned some tricks of the trade.

He said the first thing he had to do was order up all the food – and make certain it was the kind of food [the guests] liked. Then he developed a winning formula for the first couple of days.

Nelson said, "First night out I'd always have steaks, but one thing I learned: You never cook somebody's steak. Let them cook their own. Because, no matter how you cooked it, it would be wrong."

The next morning, he always made up a big batch of griddle cakes for breakfast. He said, "I used the lid from an old square-tub Maytag washer. And it worked well. So if you find an old square-tub Maytag that's missing a lid, you'll know why."

The first day the guests usually wanted to fish, so Nelson would help get their gear ready and send them off to the stream. Nelson quickly discovered that even though his cook contract didn't call for it, the General expected him to be the horse wrangler also. So he had to take care of feeding and watering the horses along with feeding the people.

According to Nelson, when the guests returned to camp they would be carrying a big batch of fish, so fish was always on the menu for the second night.

Nelson said, "The next day, I'd crimp the hooks down. They'd say, 'Why are you crimping the hooks.' And I'd say, 'Unless you want to eat fish another day, you're not gonna bring 'em back to camp, you're gonna catch and release 'em."

Nelson said they'd roast hot dogs sometimes, but "They had good food all the way along."

Thinking back on those times, Nelson said he probably made 20 trips. And he said he would do it all again – maybe.

The topic of cooks prompted Leonard Moore's daughter Sharon Lopau, who was a member of the audience, to talk about her grandmother who worked many years as a wilderness cook. Lopau lived on a ranch in the Flathead Valley and said she and her sisters grew up helping their outfitter families.

Lopau said, "When I was nine I went into the hunt camp with my grandma and grandpa, George and Fern Moore. They always packed out of Holland Lake. I went in to help grandma who cooked. And my grandma could cook like no one else in the world. We spent two days shoppin'. Lists a mile long."

On that trip, Lopau said they had 12 guests and it required 12 mules to haul all the food and gear. The first four mules carried the groceries and kitchen gear. The cook shack was the first thing that got set up.

According to Lopau, "[her grandma] had all that stuff sorted out. I mean she had a system like nothin'else."

In addition to the guests and outfitting crew, there were 25 workers from a trail crew.

Lopau said, "My grandma fed them four nights while they were over there cleaning the trails. And I mean to tell you, we were up til 10:30 at night makin' pies."

Lopau also volunteered the additional information, "[Grandma] kept granddad lined out. Man, if it hadn't been for her, that pack outfit would have gone nowhere. I kid you not."

Lopau also recalled another trip in 1964. "We had the worst flood season that had ever come through the South Fork. We had 12 guests on a summer trip. We hand-sawed logs, we hooked onto the mules and pulled the brush out of the trails, we swan the Gordon, pack string and all."

At one point, Lopau said, the trail gave out and four mules tumbled to the bottom, one landing on his back with the pack still on him. She said, "We thought we'd lost him. Dad got the revolver out." But when they got down to the bottom, they were able to get the mule back onto his feet. "So that was quite a trip," she said.

The final story she told was of a time when she and her dad went fly-fishing. She said, "We were catchin' pretty good trout and all of a sudden I heard this splashin' behind me and I turned around and here's this big ole grizzly and he's standing up, looking at us and I'm [whispering loudly] Dad... Dad... Dad... and he's just going up ahead of me, just swinging his fishin' pole and I got right up on him and I said, 'Dad, there's a bear back there.' He turned around and that bear was coming right down the river behind us, just a lookin'. He'd stand up, then he'd get down. Finally we got to a spot where we could get up out of the river and [dad] goes, 'We'd better find a tree.' And I'm going, 'Yeah, right!' – the only thing around were puny little trees. So we just stood there and kinda held our breath and [the bear] just looked at us. Then he got down and he went on."

The microphone picked up the sound of Leonard Moore chuckling.