In 1951 when my father was 10 years old, he and his mother drove from Morris, MN to the Beartooth Pass between Redlodge MT and Cook City. My father’s aunt and uncle owned what was back then known as a “dude ranch” where wealthy people mainly from Chicago and other big cities in the Midwest would come for a month or so during the summer.
The Beartooth Pass road was a gravel road then, only open about 4 months of the year. Grandma and dad drove to the trailhead with their 48 Chevy loaded with 720 eggs that his aunt had requested they bring. Fresh eggs were one of the most difficult foods to keep in stock at the ranch.
They were met at the trailhead by Uncle Jim, a real cowboy and my dad’s hero, and his long string of packhorses. This was a dream come true situation for a kid raised in the 1940s. The real west, real cowboys, real horses, dad wore his cowboy hat and got to carry his .22 in a real scabbard on horseback every day.
The ranch was known as Camp Sawtooth and it was in an idyllic large meadow with a small rushing brook running between the main lodge and the guest cabins, it was 8 rugged miles off the trailhead and only accessible by horse. My father captured the trip on his Kodak camera and we still have some of the pictures he took.
In 1957 the US Forest Service declined to renew the lease on Camp Sawtooth. They wanted to return the area to an empty wilderness and so the camp was abandoned and fell into ruin.
Fast forward 55 years. In 2006 my dad and I went back to see if we could find the remains of Camp Sawtooth. We had tried to get some information from locals, but nobody in the area had any memory of it.
Using my father’s half-century-old memory of the terrain, we hiked in and in a surprisingly short period of time, actually found the remains camp. The lodge’s stone fireplace still stands and the bridge over the creek had collapsed but was still visible. The guest cabin foundations were all there as well. There were no signs that anyone had really been there since 1957.
We even found what his uncle Jim claimed was the most valuable secret in Montana. The entrance to the trail to Crater Lake. The beginning is marked with a rock with the Camp’s brand. Crater Lake is an incredible sight, it’s a lake formed when a giant rockslide blocked a river and it is said to be hundreds of feet deep. It sits at the bottom of 200 foot sheer rock walls on all sides.
According to dad, the trout in Crater Lake bit like sunfish and they were much larger than the trout in the local streams. A few hours fishing by him and his uncle supplied the whole ranch with trout for dinner. Being a flatland boy, he had no knowledge of what kind of trout they were. Cutthroats? Rainbows?
Quite a trip back in time. The emptiness of the west is both awe-inspiring and lonely at the same time. I doubt many more than a handful of people had been in Camp Sawtooth since it was abandoned all those years ago.
Grouse
