Author: Oliver Meister

Come and visit us @ the North Fork Hostel & Inn

The outhouses

¡Outhouses!:
No plastic or hygiene products in pit please, they belong in trash. Human waste only
Keep lid closed!
And: It is OK to pee in the woods! Birds do it, bears do it, moose do it, why not you?
Also: Remember: Changing toilet paper rolls does not cause brain damage!

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by Oliver Meister

Bedding and towels

Sheets and Towels are normally not provided but can are available (Ask for help) for a small charge;

Always use bedding or sleeping bags!

Pillow cases (No charge) are next to the kitchen in the Hallway;

Please return pillow cases and sheets to hamper after use. Hang towels to dry!

 

by Oliver Meister

The shower

Shower hours: 7 AM  to 5 AM and 5 PM to 10 PM

(Please, respect quiet times; hot water may not be available after hours)

The shower has an electric light, you find the switch to the left of the light fixture above the sink.

Conserve water: We are in a fragile environment: Low groundwater table & flood plain, so please limit your time and water use, be respectful to those after you and use squeegee after each use.

Please prop door open with little stool so the room can air out.

 

by Oliver Meister

The Green Zucchini

Another small little gem for the financially challenged is the “Green Zucchini” also called pickle by some. A homemade trailer from the ’50s that barely survived the ’95 flood. Because it has drafty windows and no heat it is only available during July and August. The bed just barely big enough for two has been my home for many summers during my early time but it still enamors special visitors.

bed in the green zucchini
inside the green zucchini
by Oliver Meister

The kitchen

Kitchen hours: 7 AM to 10 PM (Please, respect quiet times)

Clean up after yourself and be respectful to others;

There are 2 guest refrigerators for your use in the kitchen, please mark and date all your food and let us know if you leave foodstuff behind, so it does not go bad.

Please wash all your dishes and wipe counter and stove tops after use; Use blue tubs to do dishes in, fill the rinse tub first so hot water can reach the kitchen, then fill the wash tub (staff will fill the sanitizer tub), it helps to conserve water and energy, Thanks!

by Oliver Meister

How to use propane lights properly

How to light propane lamps: Please familiarize yourself with them first and ask for assistance if in doubt: First light match (make sure you have a solid and big flame) hold it to the mantle (make sure only the flame, not the match is touching the mantle) and turn gas on (lever/ knob on side of lamp) For your safety, do not turn gas on first and do not blow light out!

by Oliver Meister

check in, check out

Check in between 5:30 PM and 9 PM

Make prior arrangements if you need a late check-in!

Check out before 10 AM

Please, leave room or cabin as you found it. Return pillowcases, etc. to hamper.

Electricity: We get our power from the sun but our system is fairly small. We encourage you to use the electric lights (especially until you get used to the  propane lights) and prefer it in the wash and shower room. Please, always turn all lights OFF after use. Charging power for your devices only works during the power hour. (check with Oliver, usually between 7 & 8 PM)
Shower hours: 7 AM to 10 AM and 5 PM to 10 PM (Hot water not always available)  The shower has electric light, you find the switch to the left of the light fixtures above the sink.  Please conserve water: We are in a fragile environment: Low groundwater table & flood plains. So, limit your time and water use, be respectful to those after you and use squeegee after each use; Please keep shower door propped open so air can circulate. Shower for hostel guests only.
Kitchen hours: 7 AM to 10 AM and 5 PM to 10 PM (Please, respect quiet times) Always clean up after yourself and be respectful to others; There is a guest refrigerator for your use. Please mark and date all your food. If you leave foodstuff behind date and mark “free” so it can be safely shared with other guests. Wash all your dishes, wipe counter and stove top immediately after use! Use blue tubs. Wash, Rinse, Sanitize. Help conserve water and energy!
Please recycle: Aluminum cans in blue recycle bin. Glass bottles in card board box, there is no glass recycling but it makes life easier as we have to haul all garbage to Columbia Falls; Egg shells (they compost better if burned) and paper in paper bag. Because this is bear country please no cooked or processed FOOD scraps in compost pail – only coffee, tea and raw, uncooked matters (in doubt throw in trash or ask Oliver).
How to light propane lamps: Please familiarize yourself with them first and ask for assistance if in doubt: First light match (make sure you have a solid and big flame) hold it to the mantle (make sure only the flame, not the match, is touching the mantle) and turn gas on (lever/ knob on side of lamp) For your safety, do not turn gas on first and do not blow out! Oliver loves to show you how to light the lamps safely!
Sheets and Towels are normally not provided but are available (Ask for help) for a fee! Always use bedding or sleeping bags! Pillow cases (No charge) are next to the kitchen in the Hallway; Please return pillow cases and sheets to hamper after use. Hang towels to dry.
Toilets are Outhouses! You find them in backyard, there is also a urinal! Only toilet paper and human waste goes down the hole! Absolutely no plastic or hygiene products in pit please, they belong in the trash! Keep lid closed to keep smell down and remember: Changing toilet paper rolls does not cause brain damage!
by Oliver Meister

directions

The North Fork Hostel & Inn is located on the western edge of Glacier National Park, 1/4 mile (1/2 kilometer) southeast of the Polebridge Mercantile at the end of Beaver Drive (follow the signs). Taking Camas Creek Road through Glacier Park (except when the park is snowed in during the winter) avoids a rough section of the North Fork Road. The North Fork Road north from Columbia Falls to Polebridge is route 486, a gravel road with sections of pavement. In winter when coming from West Glacier, use Blankenship Bridge Road( call ahead for directions). It is a good idea to have tire chains with you in winter. Try to arrive during daytime to appreciate the views and to locate the North Fork Hostel & Inn easily.
The Square Peg Ranch is about 500 yards north of the Polebridge intersections on the left side, but stop at the hostel first and pick up your key.
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by Oliver Meister

the hostel

What you’ll find at the North Fork Hostel & Inn include twelve bunks for men and women, couples and family accommodations, washroom and a hot shower.
A large downstairs shared living room, a warm and pleasant, fully-equipped community kitchen and the spiffiest outhouses on the North Fork. (The interior art is interesting — look for John’s college diploma.)
Behind the Inn are small cabins that are private bedrooms. (Goat Chalet, Klondike Kate’s and the Green Zucchini) You still use the facilities in the hostel. The Goat Chalet has a queen size bed, perfect for a couple; Klondike Kate’s has a queen size bed and a futon couch, ideal for a small family or two individuals; the Green Zucchini has a full size mattress, works great for a couple or individual! Also, there are two log homes for rent up the road at the Square Peg Ranch.
Don’t forget to bring linen or sleeping bags, flashlights and food. Clean sheets can be rented at the hostel. There are plenty of blankets and a few down comforters.
check in between 5pm and 10pm and check out before 10am

 

by Oliver Meister

Spring Serenity

SPRING SERENITY
By LARRY KLINE – Independent Record – 03/26/09
POLEBRIDGE – I awoke to a thump-thump-thump sound of fresh spring snow blowing off the trees and landing on the metal roof.
It was morning in North Fork Country.
Situated next to Glacier National Park’s western boundary about 20 miles south of the Canadian border, Polebridge offers visitors a relaxed
attitude and sweeping views of the Livingston Range to the east and the Whitefish Range to the west.
And the North Fork Hostel, with its cheap beds and off-the-beaten-path ambiance, serves as an excellent base camp to explore the park’s
west side and the Flathead River’s North Fork.
Named for a lodge pole pine bridge that crossed the river at the ranger station (until it burned in the 1988 Red Bench Fire), Polebridge in
spring is a getaway for wanderers, students, couples, singles and anyone seeking solitude along the snowy banks of the semi-frozen tributary.
Come July, this little town with a year-round population of 14 swells with tourists who want views of Bowman and Kintla lakes, and perhaps a
tasty treat from the historic Polebridge Mercantile, which sports some phenomenal baked goods, and a refreshing drink from the Northern
Lights Saloon.
Cross the new bridge now, though, and you’ll find a largely empty park open for exploration. With the cheap lodging available, this springtime
trip can be an affordable getaway and a chance to see Glacier in a way most never will.
I skied along the North Fork one afternoon earlier this month with my partner-in-adventure beside me, and spent about four hours in the
fresh snow.
It was a day for snow squalls, and we watched the storms drift in and out of the mountains. The river’s ice changed from gray to pale blue
in the shifting sunlight. We followed snowed-in ski tracks, and no one followed us. A curious raptor briefly circled above.
The river and the sky and the snow were ours alone.
Exhausted, we returned that night to pan-fry steaks in the hostel’s large, communal kitchen. There’s no electricity or natural gas in Polebridge,
so we cooked on a propane stove, under the glow of propane lights. A massive old woodstove, its black iron accented with chrome, occupies
one end of the kitchen.
We chatted with Oliver, the hostel’s owner, before heading to bed. He’s run the hostel for six years, and bought the place last winter.
No one seems to know the history of the building, which actually consists of two large old cabins that were moved together in the 1940s.
The hostel’s founder bought the place in 1978, and the inn has since served travelers with character and charm.
Beds are $20 per night. A shower is available, along with the kitchen and living room, for communal use. Couples and families have the option of
private rooms upstairs, and travelers also have a few cabins out back to choose from. More cabins are available north of the hostel in summer months.
Oliver is a friendly and knowledgeable host, and staying at the hostel is pretty simple living (the outhouses are festooned with all sorts of interesting décor). Bring food n a refrigerator is available n and be sure to conserve propane and water during the stay. Guests are expected to clean up after themselves, and Oliver claims to charge double rates to those who don’t do their dishes.
Come prepared, of course n there aren’t many services available in Polebridge. There’s no fuel and only one restaurant-bar establishment with variable hours. The Mercantile has everything a small-town store would have (canned foods, some other groceries and specialty items, along with the baked goods) but it’s best to bring enough food to last.
We chose to rent the Goat Chalet n its former residents were four-legged, according to rumors — and I would recommend the little cabin behind
the hostel to anyone who goes. The cozy structure (probably about 12-by-14 feet) holds a queen-sized bed, a small table and a wood stove
for heat. And it has a great morning-coffee porch, complete with rocking chairs.
The first night, we chatted with a soil analyst while a quartet of University of Montana students played spades. A few other guests read quietly
in the living room.
Rain fell the second night instead of snow, and we awoke to find the thigh-deep drifts crusty with ice. We strapped on the snowshoes and
headed up the Bowman Lake road. Scorched trunks, 20 years dead, reached toward the sky, with new growth already standing tall beneath.
The peaks of the Livingston Range n Glacier’s western front n slowly revealed themselves through the breaking clouds, the blazing sun catching
first one snowfield and then another. Jagged rocks grew out of the mists and then faded once more.
Oliver’s photo blog shows pictures of wolves in the area in January, so we were on the lookout for tracks. We got lucky and found a nice set
of three tracks leading out of the woods. They had followed the road for about 30 yards before turning off into the trees once more.
The tracks had likely been made the night before. I wondered if the wolves were still nearby, and if they could smell us.
I put a finger in the crisp print and traced the marks, trying to imagine the paw and its owner.
North Fork Hostel
How to get there: Drive to Columbia Falls (from Helena, the Seeley-Swan Highway is the most direct route, making for a roughly 500-mile
round-trip). Take Nucleus Avenue north from U.S. Highway 2, and then veer right onto Railroad Street. This curves to the left and turns
into the Montana Highway 486, which is the North Fork Road. Follow the signs to the town and the hostel. Other lodging is available
, including cabins that can be rented from the U.S. Forest Service and the Polebridge Mercantile.
Caution: The first 10 miles are paved before the road turns to gravel with intermittent pavement. We drove it March 14, and it was mostly
solid snow and ice. Four- or all-wheel-drive vehicles are recommended, and tire chains are suggested.
Click here for a complete list of accommodations and prices, and it’s best to call ahead (406-888-5241) for reservations.
by Oliver Meister

Polebridge hostel owner sells his keys to the world

By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
POLEBRIDGE – His first impulse was to run, to turn tail and never look back at that ramshackle stack of logs the real estate agent kept calling a cabin.
“But I was looking for something a little more exciting than Ohio, and the more I thought about it, the more exciting it seemed,” John Frederick said.
Frederick wanted to live “somewhere on the rustic side,” and his future ex-wife wanted to run a hostel, like the European hostels in which she’d spent four years while traveling the continent.
And there it was, the decrepit cabin on 2 1/2 acres, backed by public land and a wild and scenic river – many, many miles from the nearest power line – where grizzly bears, despite their endangered status, outnumbered the human neighbors by a considerable margin.
Needless to say, he bought it.
Lock, stock and barrel for $39,000.
It was the ’70s, after all, and this ponytailed back-to-the-lander was “just living. That’s all. Just living.”
A full 30 years later, Frederick finally is selling his wildly popular North Fork Hostel, located on the outskirts of downtown Polebridge. The town, if it can be called that, is a northwoods outpost home to a saloon, a mercantile and one very colorful honorary mayor.
That’d be Frederick. And he’s retiring.
The getting here is no easy thing, what with the only route in being a jagged and rock-pocked road that eats tires the way a cheese grater eats the skin off your knuckles.
An hour north of Columbia Falls, almost to Canada and hard up to Glacier National Park’s western boundary, the North Fork Flathead River Valley remains much the same as the day Frederick first laid eyes on it. His hostel, though, is no longer derelict; it has been spruced up, fixed up, primed and painted and peopled with visitors from all over the world.
“Hostel travelers are different,” Frederick said. “They tend to be rather friendlier than your average tourist.”
They don’t want to hide away in a resort with all the comforts, he said. They want to “meet other people, talk to other people and get involved. They want to be a part of the place.”
He’ll remember David Mech, the wolf biologist who stayed for months on end, in the little cabin out back. When he left, Frederick was cleaning the place out and for whatever reason laid himself down on the bed. It was one of those old mattresses, the kind with all the little buttons sewn on top.
“Oh no,” Frederick said. “It was a horrible bed. Horrible. I felt so bad. That’s when I started the habit of laying in every bed at least once a year.”
Once a year’s enough. It’s a hostel, after all. No need to get too excited about bed buttons.
And he’ll remember Steve Lake, too, the English guy whose home back home was made from wood salvaged out of a ship dating to the 1500s. “Now that’s pretty cool,” Frederick said.
He’ll remember the Israeli fellow who was so excited about spotting a squirrel in the woods.
“That reminded me what a special place we have here,” Frederick said. “We’re all out looking for the big guys, the bears and the lions, and he’s thrilled to see a squirrel. Your perspective sure changes in a place like a hostel.”
That’s because here, so far from anywhere, the world comes to you.
They come from all around the big round globe, from big cities and from tiny towns, too. The hostel walls are papered in the world’s currency, many of the small bills now extinct, victims of inflation.
The Russians never came much, though, and neither did the South Americans or the Mexicans. “And it’s too uncultivated for the Japanese,” Frederick said.
But everyone else came in droves, especially the Germans.
“They love this place,” he said of the Germans. “They love the wilderness.”
Just ask Oliver Meister. He came, way back in 1992, from southern Germany to stay for a night – but he stayed for a summer, returned for years, and now is buying the place.
“I found it by pure accident,” the immigrant said. “I had been traveling around the world for about 10 years, and was camping up in Glacier Park.”
It was cold, he remembered, and rainy, and he asked a ranger where he could get in out of the weather for a day or so. “I found the hostel and I never left,” he said.
For the past five years, this inveterate traveler has not traveled, a fact that seems to genuinely surprise him as it crosses his mind.
“I didn’t have to travel,” Meister said. “The world comes to me.”
This international oasis deep in Montana’s backwoods is his home now, and as of the first of the year it will be his livelihood, too.
“Oliver’s a better businessman than I ever was,” Frederick said. “Someone gives me a sob story and I let them stay for free. He’s smarter than that.”
“There’s always a way,” Meister said of shelter at the hostel. “There’s always chores that need to be done. If someone’s short on cash, we can put them to work.”
In fact, before becoming manager of the hostel these many years, Meister himself traded labor for a place to hang his hat. And the beds, he said, are better now. No buttons.
The four basic rooms handle a baker’s dozen, the two small cabins a half-dozen more. Meister has plans for a private room upstairs, to handle the more “upscale” of the hostel’s thousands of guests that arrive each summer.
There’s the father-son groups that return year after year, the families and loners who show up each and every July like Capistrano’s swallows. There’s the old friends and the new friends and “all the loveable crazies,” as Frederick calls them.
Among the crazies, of course, is the lady who showed up on her bicycle, here so far from anywhere, with a huge old sleeping bag strapped to the rear fender and not much more.
“She was nutty as a fruitcake,” Frederick said. “She really would’ve been better under somebody’s supervision.”
But he swapped her a smaller sleeping bag, got her on her feet, pointed her back down the road to where the real world waited.
“A lot of people who come through are a little lost,” he said. “They’re looking for something. They stay a while, think about it, talk with people, and when they leave, they have a direction.”
It helps, of course, that there’s only one direction out, one road, and that heads south.
“Hostel folk are unique,” Frederick said. “They tend to be younger and maybe not so wealthy. Some are so idealistic they don’t even fit in the real world. Some are so practical you want to hit them on the head. They’re people with ideas, people who want to do things.”
After 30 years, though, all Frederick wants to do is get back to “just living.”
“Thirty years is a long time,” he said. “It saps your energy, and I just don’t deal with people so well anymore.”
Except the ones Meister sends his way. When an interesting traveler comes through, particularly an interesting lady, someone from somewhere with a story that Frederick should hear, Meister goes and gets the boss.
“They are so interesting,” Meister said of his guests. “They are the neatest people in the world.”
And they come, and keep coming, at $15 a night, because “here, it’s not the usual hubbub of the world. It’s not the rat race.”
It is, however, a business, and now that Meister’s bought the farm, so to speak, Frederick has a bit of advice for his friend.
“It was fun,” he said of his 30-year run. “I didn’t make any money at all, not a dime, but it was fun.”
Which the “hostel meister” knows, of course. You might say his first instinct, too, was to run.
“I didn’t really want to buy it,” Meister said, “but John wanted to sell. Basically, I bought it just to keep living here, to maintain my lifestyle.”
And the lifestyle of all those interesting and international globetrotters who arrive on the doorstep every summer.
“I love it,” Meister said. “I love the people who come through. They’re like family. It’s a friendly place, where people can be themselves.
“This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. I have everything I need from this world right here in Polebridge.”
by Oliver Meister