ABOUT US …
and how we came to run the Lodge and what else we are doing in Kingston.

Pete grew up on a North Dakota farm, the youngest of seven siblings. There he learned to drive big tractors and taught himself how to play guitar. He earned a degree in horticulture, then moved to the west coast, where he worked designing and creating landscapes in Seattle and southern California. In 1977 the young sport of flying discs, commonly called Frisbee, captured his attention. Having thrown a lot of rocks on the farm, he excelled at the sport. In addition to making friends all around the world, in 1993 Pete and a partner set a Guinness Book world record for throwing a disc over 200 miles in 24 hours.

Pete and I were married on New Years Eve, 1994 during a party at the Lodge. I found the Black Range Lodge with my first husband on our honeymoon in 1984. We were casually looking at a small cabin, where we intended to spend time writing screenplays – that was not too far from where my parents lived and I grew up, in Las Cruces, NM. At that time, the Lodge was closed, and for sale. We found it to be a magnificent structure, and something about it spoke to us. We bought it with the intentions of developing it as a facility to make low-budget feature films, and as a quiet place in the country to write.

During the first few years we split our time between Kingston and Los Angeles, where I worked freelance as a DGA Assistant Director for television and films. Somehow it was easy to transition to life in New Mexico – we had good neighbors and enjoyed becoming members of the friendly local community with a people-friendly pace. During the screenwriter’s strike of 1988 work in the movie business virtually haulted for months, during which decided to open the Lodge as a Bed and Breakfast for the first time in sixteen years.

At first we worked on the comfort level of the Lodge, and to get the word out that it was back in business. We truly enjoyed sharing this unique building and its history with people adventurous enough to discover it. Sometimes strangers would drop in and share a memory about the Lodge, or about Kingston’s colorful past. Planting trees and a garden (with advice from knowledgeable neighbors) brought me great satisfaction. Waking up in the mornings to birdsong and the beauty of the Black Range was a revelation. Though I was in my early 30s, I knew I had found home.

In 1991 I teamed up with another Hollywood transplant in Hillsboro to co-produce a low-budget movie called Paper Hearts. We filmed it on location right here in Hillsboro and environs, and it was hard, but fun for the whole community. It starred James Brolin, Sally Kirkland, and Kris Kristofferson and featured an original song by Michael Martin Murphy. This independent feature film was invited to the Sundance Film Festival in 1993. When it was released on video, they changed the name to Cheatin’ Hearts. (Read a review.)

Of course there was plenty to do to keep up and improve the historic Lodge. The structure was sound, but plumbing, electrical and heating systems needed work. We seemed to spend a fortune every winter to keep the Lodge warm enough – and the answer to improving its winter comfort was not an easy one. Eventually, I decided that a passive solar greenhouse, added to the south wall of the Lodge, would not only provide some free heat from the sun, but it would provide me with a place to garden all year. When I heard about strawbale construction in 1992 – a “new” building technique – I felt that this cheap insulating building block was the answer.

We began building the strawbale greenhouse that fall. We hosted a workshop to teach bale building, and managed to get the bales in and stucco started all one weekend. Stacking soft, fluffy strawbales with family and friends, neighbors and strangers hardly seemed like work at all. I was transformed by the experience. We turned the video footage of the event into a modest instructional film, and I began traveling to learn more about building with bales from the few people doing it at the time.

In the ensuing decade I became an advocate for strawbale building, shooting video to document the construction process, finished homes, and a laboratory testing program to help get straw bales into the NM building code. This turned into a video series called Building With Straw (soon to be on DVD.) I also began giving slide shows and contributing articles and photographs to magazines like Mother Earth News, Communities, Home Power and The Last Straw journal. In 1998 I produced and directed a video called The Straw Bale Solution, which was honored with an award at the Earth Vision Film and Video Festival.

Here at the Black Range Lodge, Pete and I started hosting straw-bale conferences, and in 1995 we organized the first annual Natural Building Colloquium – a weeklong series of hands-on workshops and presentations that brought together over 100 far-flung practitioners to share their experience with each other. Some of this knowledge was published in 2001 in the anthology The Art of Natural Building, which I co-authored and co-edited with colleagues Joe Kennedy and Michael Smith.

In 1995 we also began the design and construction of the strawbale Guest House, as a vacation home for my mother and father. This project benefited from the hard work of many skilled (and unskilled) builders -- including our friend and neighbor, Tom Lander, whose many talents are evidenced in the finished home. We’re proud of how the Guest House turned out, and are happy to give tours when it’s available.

Between 1998 and 2003 we published The Last Straw, the international journal of straw bale and natural building, right here at the Lodge. Managing and editing this quarterly publication connected me even more with the broad-based community of natural builders. In 1999 we helped found Builders Without Borders, a network of ecological builders dedicated to affordable healthy housing through education and hands-on workshops. To distribute the strawbale videos we were making, we created Natural Building Resources, a mail order bookstore for hands-on, how-to educational materials. During the past decade it has been exciting to witness more and more quality books emerge from the collective minds of the natural building “movement.”

In 2003, a book I wrote and photographed was published. Called The New Strawbale Home, it is a hardcover photographic tour of forty houses across the U.S. and Canada. Currently I am working on a new book about natural building for the same company, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, due out in spring 2007.

Over the last decade, Pete has been developing the Lodge grounds with more flowers, fruit trees, and bamboo groves. Yes, bamboo can thrive in our climate with proper care, and it offers beautiful perennial greenery. He also tends the bananas in the greenhouse and our free-range chickens. There is always some project going on around here – you are invited to come see for yourself.