The ranch comprises 56,050 acres, plus a 168,000-acre wildlife preserve that the family has leased from the National Forest, Bureau of Land Management, and State and Park Service lands.
There are mountains, 20 miles of river, forests filled with aspen, spruce, pine, and fir, pasture land, meadows, and canyons.
“I didn’t understand the magnitude of it until we really started to drive through it,” she said. “To get from the upper to the lower part of the ranch took an hour and a half.”
The family chose to site the house “on top of a bluff, in the middle of pastures with views of the mountains,” Krukowski said, and hired a log cabin company to build an 11,000-square-foot, nine bedroom, nine-and-a-half-bath home.
Simultaneously, Boeddeker employed a small army of workers to bring electricity, plumbing, and roads to the property. “He built roads that were never there, a driveway that was a mile long, fishing ponds, and, of course, utilities,” she said.
Things moved so quickly that the family was able to celebrate Christmas there in 1993, a little more than a year after they’d closed on the land.
In time, the Victorian house was gutted and restored, living quarters for employees were built, and “in the late 1990s, we leased out our hunting operation to an outfitter in Tennessee, and he brought in LL Bean,” she said. The outfitter had a show on ESPN, she explained, and “LL Bean, who was a sponsor, paid to build a hunting lodge.”
Once the show was over, the 4,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath structure was left to the Boeddekers, who now call the structure Fish Creek Lodge.
Thirty Employees
At the same time that they were turning it into a vacation retreat, the Boeddekers were also improving the agriculture. When they bought it, “there were maybe five employees already there, doing cattle operations and sheep herding,” Krukowski said.
Soon, her father had hired a ranch manager, caretaking couple, and people to handle the horses. “We had an [equestrian] arena built, along with stables,” she said. They grew the ranch to include more than 2,000 head of cattle and added more sheep. At its height, there were more than 30 full-time employees to take care of it all.
Even as he improved the land, her father was profoundly aware of his responsibility as “a temporary custodian,” Krukowski said. “He always said that he was just the steward for the land for the time he happened to have it,” she said. “Now, we want to make sure it passes on to its next steward.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.