About Us

The story about how Jeff and I came to live on the beautiful rural ridge top above the Mississippi River in SE Minnesota is one of chance, luck, word-of-mouth, planning, surprises, changing of minds, forks in the road, choices, love and gratitude.

Neither of us came from this area originally. Jeff was raised on a small dairy farm in central Minnesota, and I grew up 20 miles west of Chicago. My first exposure to what I now have come to know as the driftless zone is memorable. It was back in the mid 70s. The natural beauty here astounded me, so much that I looked for work in La Crosse, Wisconsin so I could live in this area. It seemed to be such a well-kept secret! In 1980 this area became my home, a very deliberate choice.

At the end of the ridge road, the route descended to a steep (and yes somewhat dangerous on a bike) road between the woods and bluff walls into the tiny city of Dakota, Minnesota.

I’d often stop at a local apple orchard to chat with the owners. I didn’t know then that those people were to become some of my very best friends and neighbors. The return back to La Crescent for me, was on a bike trail next to the river. Whenever I was riding this route, I just couldn’t imagine doing anything more exhilarating and joyful. I remember repeatedly thinking that I wanted to live up there on that ridge some day.

Well, “some day” became reality. It was complete serendipity! Jeff and I had both established our careers and had been looking for rural property on either side of the river. Our friends and co-workers knew this. One day, we got a call from one of my co-workers who had heard through a friend of a friend about a 20 acre piece of property that was for sale by owner, located along the Minnesota ridge top along “my favorite bike route”!! Neither of us will ever forget heading up to the top of the ridge to meet the seller and see the land. It was an evening complete with a full-fledged Midwestern storm….pouring rain, lightening zigzagging the sky, thunder booming, so dark we couldn’t really see unless the lightening showed the way. We were soaked to the bone, and probably lucky not to have been struck down in the middle of the field as we screamed through the loud storm to each other “This is it!! We’ve found it!”

The rest is history. There has not been a day since that I have not considered ourselves some of the luckiest people on earth. We had stumbled across a gem right smack in the middle of the driftless zone.

The next four years or so involved getting married and moving from Wisconsin to a rental house in La Crescent, Minnesota to be closer to our land 8 miles from there. We spent those first years picking rocks and planting over 4000 trees in the top 1/3 of the acreage that had been a farmed field. The rest of the property is steep woodland that drops down into the bottom of the valley below, overlooking a large apple orchard area just outside the small city of Dakota.

Jeff and I were chomping to live on the land as soon as we could. We decided to build a simple 2-bedroom house on a slab in which we could move in and live for 3 or maybe 4 years while we planned, designed and saved up for our house. This temporary home would then serve as a shop later on.

So, in late 1990, not only did we begin the temporary home building process, but we also became pregnant with our first child.

So the adventure proceeded. In 1993, our daughter Erin was born. By then it was seeming a tad impossible to move forward with building a permanent house within the time frame we thought we could meet. Children changed all of that.

I look back happily at the years we spent living as a family in our little 900 square foot house. We were fairly stuffed in there, Trav and Erin sharing a very small room with a bunk bed, no basement for storage. There was my grandfather’s piano to squeeze in so the kids could practice for their piano lessons. Jeff built a little house in the woods so the kids could have a place to play and have over-nights with friends. Fortunately we had friends and family who, at the time, were tent campers. We had plenty of campsites, just not much other room for company.

It wasn’t until our kids were 13 and 11 years of age that we moved into our new house, built nearby across the driveway. I’ll never forget our youngest saying just before we moved, as all 4 of us sat on a couch watching a movie, “Will we still all be able to sit on the same couch and watch a movie together after we move?” I do know, as cozy as those memories are, that we moved just in time. Teenagers don’t tend to like that much togetherness. Spreading out was a good thing just then. But what a wonderful place it had been to raise young children.

Another reason our 3 to 4 years of planned “temporary” living turned into 13 years was because we decided to start raising alpacas, following a fork in our road. North Ridge Alpacas was our first entrepreneurial venture. We raised breeding stock and processed the fiber into yarn. We had as many as 28 suri alpacas at the height of our capacity. We loved them and had a herd for 13 years. The kids grew up helping with chores, enjoying the birth of cria (babies) every spring, and doing a little bit of showing. We sold out by 2007 when it became very difficult to maintain careers, follow both kids on their competitive swim teams, care for livestock and keep up with all the work a rural property requires. The fiber side of the business still thrives to this day. Find out more of the story in the blog post entitled “Before North Ridge Gesthouse, We Were North Ridge Alpacas….”. For those interested in purchasing alpaca yarn, please head over to blog post called “Skeins a Plenty”.