January, 2017 | The Last Best Blog

January 30, 2017January 31, 2017

Swing into Spring at Paws Up

Here at Paws Up , we have the secret cure for the winter blues: plan a trip around one of our upcoming spring events. Banish the blahs with Valentine’s Day festivities or with the Eat, Drink and Meet Merry Wine Weekend or plan to attend WildFlavor or the Cowgirl Spring Roundup. Relax with gourmet dinners, wine tastings and spa treatments or amp up your adrenaline with snowmobiling or horseback riding on the Montana terrain. You could even learn to wrangle and shoot at our world-class property. (Psst: We’ve also had a few opportunities to rub cowboy boots with super special celeb guests who’ve recently visited The Resort.) From food to fauna and wine to wilderness, spring at Paws Up is going to be spectacular.

Valentine’s Day at The Resort at Paws Up

It might not be balmy outdoors yet, but we guarantee this event will warm you right up. We’re pulling out all the sweet stops this year for a twosome getaway, available February 11—15. Dream up a list of all things romantic, and we can make all your wishes come true, including:

A private wilderness chic rustic cabin
Crackling fires
Intimate dinners
Spa treatments for two
Private outdoor adventures

There’s always room for more love, so we’ll include a welcome basket with champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries; (more) champagne, oysters and caviar during one dinner; a half-day activity credit per person and accommodations with a hot tub and bottle of wine.

Valentine’s Day doesn’t get any better than this, and it’s all here waiting for you at The Resort at Paws Up.

Eat Drink and Meet Merry

We hinted at celeb sightings, and the first of famous folks to visit Paws Up in 2017 will be Vintners Hall of Fame inductee Merry Edwards, one of California’s first woman winemakers. As part of our inaugural Wine Weekend event, you will clink glasses with Edwards and her vintner partner, Ken Coopersmith.

Highlights include a wine seminar and outdoor adventuring with the winemakers. The crown jewel will be enjoying mouthwatering dinners with expert vino pairings from the Merry Edwards Winery, known for its exquisite Russian River Valley Pinot Noirs. Wine Weekend corresponds with the 20th anniversary of the Merry Edwards Winery, founded in 1997.

This first-ever Wine Weekend will also feature live entertainment, tastings and plenty of hands-on learning (read: plenty of wine sipping!) so you can impress friends at home with your sommelier-like expertise. Burn off the extra indulgences with adrenaline-pumping adventures such as snow tubing, horseback riding or sporting clays shooting. We hope to see you March 16—18. Cheers!

WildFlavor

Saddle up for the ultimate culinary ride with flora, fauna and flavor at our WildFlavor event, April 20—23. The first of its kind at The Resort, WildFlavor will feature cream-of-the-crop culinary talent with four Top Chef stars including Kristen Kish (winner, Season 10), Sam Talbot (finalist, Season 2) Casey Thompson (finalist, Season 3) and Brooke Williamson (runner-up, Season 10). Guests will have a prime spot to watch these chefs “fork it out” during a live cook-off challenge. A trio of expertly crafted meals will be served during the tasty four-day event.

WildFlavor is the perfect blend of food, fun and live entertainment, plus enough outdoor activities to fill up any spaces in between. Special guest singer-songwriter Austin Jenckes (The Voice, Season 5) will be on hand for a soulful Saturday night performance of his folk-rock guitar-based melodies.

Fun spoiler alert: Be sure to tune in to Top Chef before you come for WildFlavor, as Talbot, Thompson and Williamson are all returning to compete in Season 14.

Cowgirl Spring Roundup

We bill this April 27—30 event as the ultimate immersion Into Cowgirl Culture, and that’s a description we take seriously. You can swap Wild West Stories and ride alongside Cowgirl Hall of Fame honorees, including champion rider Sandy Collier, famed artist Deborah Fellows and equestrian trailblazer Patricia E. Kelly. For three days you will participate in cowgirl skills workshops and a special ranch photography clinic with award-winning photographer Barbara Van Cleve. The Roundup will feature trail rides on horseback, hiking on breathtaking paths across The Resort and relaxing in front of a campfire by every night. You’ll also wrangle and herd cattle across the vast Montana landscape and test your aim at our sporting clays course.

Grab the girls and book a getaway for the Cowgirl Spring Roundup. Just like every other top-notch event at The Resort, you’ll enjoy your fill of gourmet food, perfect wine and cocktail pairings, luxe accommodations and spa treatments. It’s the perfect way to finish out a spring break getaway.

January 18, 2017June 30, 2023

The Resort at Paws Up Introduces North Bank Camp

It used to be next to impossible to get this close to Montana’s unbridled nature while enjoying all the rich comforts of a luxury resort. Then the masterminds at Paws Up invented glamping®. And ever since, adventure seekers have been gazing out from our well-appointed tents and casting their eyes over a pristine landscape, complete with the rush of water just 50 feet below.

To help ensure our guests can reserve a stay and enjoy the experience they crave, we’re expanding our glamping options—and we’re doing it in a way that keeps the wilderness intact.

Sneak Peak

On a beautiful site about a half-mile downriver from the chuck wagon dining area, the new North Bank camp will offer beautiful views of the Blackfoot River. It’ll encompass the same safari-style tents as our other camps and include the same uncompromising amenities, such as rustic chic décor, sumptuous bed linens and en suite bathrooms with heated floors. Each tent will have a private deck overlooking the majestic river. And like the other camps, North Bank will be the perfect jumping-off point for any number of exciting outdoor activities.

What makes the new camp different is its size. According to Brian Bandy, project manager for The Resort at Paws Up, while the other camps have four double tents and two single tents, the new camp will have four doubles and two triples, and the triples will have two full baths instead of one. This means North Bank will ideal for larger families and groups wanting to buy out an entire site.

To accommodate more people, North Bank’s Dining Pavilion will be about 30 percent larger than the pavilions at the other camps. It will also feature sliding glass doors, so guests will be able to take in the magnificent view while dining.

Of course, in keeping with the Paws Up aesthetic and our strict environmental principles, Bandy pointed out, “Whenever we build a camp, we’re concerned about the Blackfoot corridor; we want to make sure nothing looks out of place. We do as little excavation as possible. We don’t remove trees, and we do as little trimming as possible.” In other words, anything Paws Up creates needs to be in harmony with nature. Guests can look forward to seeing the finished North Bank camp in late May 2017.

What’s new this year in all our camps? Paws Up is installing complimentary Wi-Fi, not just in the pavilions, but in the tents as well. To plan your stay at North Bank or any of our other incredible sites, don’t wait. We’re already taking reservations for unforgettable stays under Montana’s Big Sky. Click here for more.

January 8, 2017

Come Cook with Brooke Williamson at The Resort at Paws Up

Say hello to Chef Brooke Williamson, a fearless and unstoppable Southern Californian who’s become a bit of a regular at The Resort at Paws Up. We love hosting her, because she brings energy and fresh local ingredients to everything she does.

You might know her from Top Chef. She’s currently reappearing to compete in Season 14: Charleston, South Carolina, airing right now on Bravo. In Season 10, Williamson was the runner-up and a favorite among the show’s fans.

When she’s not on TV, she’s busy running the four smash-hit restaurants she owns with her husband. The newest opened just this past October—a fast- casual Hawaiian concept named Da Kikokiko in Playa Vista, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

What does she do for fun? She comes to The Resort at Paws Up, of course. In 2017, she’ll be a featured chef at no fewer than three culinary events: WinterFest on January 19– 22, WildFlavor on April 20–23 and Bounty on the Blackfoot on August 19. So we asked her to tell us about her experiences here.

What’s the first thing you like to do when you arrive at Paws Up?  I like to grab a drink at Tank and head straight to my cabin to chill on the porch. The sounds of wilderness that surround those cabins are the perfect way to decompress after a day of travel.

What do you look forward to most when you visit?  Because of the fact that I get to experience the ranch at different times of year, the things I look forward to in terms of activities vary greatly. Between pristine snow and cattle drives, I could stay entertained forever.

But the one thing that I can always count on, no matter what time of year, is the staff. I do a lot of events, all over the country, but never do I travel to a place and feel so welcomed and at home as I do at Paws Up.

What’s a dish you’ve made just for Paws Up guests that was especially wonderful?  Seafood salad, cucumber and tomato water, compressed melons. I made this dish for an event last summer, and although I would normally gravitate toward mentioning a dish that feels more “Montana,” I actually loved this dish not only because of the setting and weather that it was served in, but mostly because I got to use some of the best local watermelon I’ve ever tasted.

How does cooking in Montana differ from cooking in LA? Cooking in Montana makes you realize how important and special cooking “local” can be. I come from California, where we have beautiful seasons for produce, and an enormous variety of pretty much anything you want.

But Montana helps me realize how specific seasons can actually be based on climate and accessibility. From elk to buffalo to huckleberries and specific mushrooms, it’s especially fun to find new ways to highlight ingredients that I don’t come across every day in Los Angeles.

January 3, 2017January 3, 2017

Curling Comes to The Resort at Paws Up

Once again, during WinterFest 2017, the Missoula Curling Club (MCC) will join us at Paws Up to demonstrate and teach the enigmatic sport known as curling. Like last year, the club and Paws Up guests will get a chance to play at The Resort’s “official” curling court (otherwise known as the Paws Up Ice Rink).

The sport involves two teams sliding (and guiding through the sweeping of brooms) 40-pound hunks of granite down a “sheet,” or playing field, of ice. The team that repeatedly gets its so-called stones closest to the center of a target at each end of the sheet eventually wins a curling match. The sport, which gained medal status in the Winter Olympics in 1998, is often misunderstood but actually easy to learn and fun to play, according to most curling enthusiasts.

The nonprofit Missoula Curling Club was formed in 2010. “We have 130 members playing on 28 teams in the Competitive and Recreational League. We began in Fall 2010 after the February 2010 Olympic games— which got a few folks in Missoula saying ‘we can do that,’ so a club was born,” says MCC President Barry Bollenbacher. He estimates that about 20,000 people in the United States play the sport of curling. But in Canada, the sport is huge, with about 2.1 million active curlers. The sport is hard to excel at, but easy to enjoy, says Bollenbacher, and the fact that you can enjoy a beverage during a match adds to the fun.

He recommends coming out early to the Paws Up “sheet” this year to experience curling for yourself. Lessons will take place at WinterFest on Friday, January 20, from 3 to 5 p.m., so you’ll be well prepared to take part in the exhibition game later that night, from 8:30 p.m. until 11:00 p.m. Be sure to check out the amazing chefs, distillery, brewer and musicians at WinterFest 2017!