Sweetgrass at Thunderbasin
My limited grasp of oenophilia, the appreciation of wine, centers upon the connoisseur’s sensitivity to terroir. The wine drinker, for whom taste is craft, is called to locate in each sip a hint of the environment, the very landscape in which a grape is produced. Perhaps therein lies my attraction: how romantic is the idea that place and time, the transitory communion of earth and sky and sun and water, can reiterate itself upon the tongue?
So too does the hunter know all about terroir, finding hints of sagebrush and dust in a pronghorn shoulder roast, rose hips and prairie grass in the flesh of a sharptail breast. The hunter pursues subtlety of flavor over miles and days, building a sensory relationship with a landscape that is fully realized when the literal flesh of the place becomes part of the hunter’s own. A similar experience is available to the farmer and rancher who fosters seed into fruit and puts young stock out on pasture. The process of husbandry requires a longer, slower courtship between human and food, but earth and water remain the forces that ultimately determine the character of what is consumed: eat a just-dug new potato and you will know something of soil you did not know before, bite a September apple and you’ll know a bit more about sunlight.
Those who grow food and hunt food, who forage and tend livestock, sit down at the dinner table to make meaning of their place in the world. In each bite, they parse something subtle but essential, and utterly unique.
It’s an early autumn afternoon in northeast Wyoming, and that high, hard sun is sinking, throwing long shadows into timbered draws. A pickup hunt rig fitted with seats above the bed shifts down into low gear and switches up and out of the bottomland, gaining higher ground. Riders hold their hats and duck beneath overhanging branches. The terrain is disconcertingly varied, cleaved and humped through pine trunks. On the ridgetop, the cloak of timber falls away to reveal a swell of grassland, a vantage west towards the Bighorns and a bookend east toward the Black Hills. The passengers on this ride are hunters first, and therefore attuned to the magnificence of landscape. But they are hungry ones, having walked enough steps through the day to warrant an appetite, and the meal at the end of this road creates a distraction.
The truck follows the spine of a ridge that droops to a flat. There, a cluster of structures becomes plain: a platform tent, a firepit surrounded by chairs, a vintage chuckwagon immaculately restored, strings of hanging lights. The details of this outpost become clearer as the truck draws close, as do the smells of good things cooking. A woman in a western hat and plaid shirt scurries about, checking in with folks tending spitted meat, straightening a table laid before a bar, placing centerpieces on dining tables. She delivers one last piece of direction to a gentleman chopping herbs, stands up tall, and smiles as the truck delivers its load of guests.
This is Deirdre Wildman, owner, operator, and culinary mastermind behind Wyoming’s Sweetgrass at Thunderbasin Lodge. In a visit to Sweetgrass, Deirdre will be everywhere, and nearly always in motion, but capable of delivering a delicate synthesis of service that never feels frenetic. She receives guests with the grace of a dancer and the warmth of an inarguable presence. Somehow, though, she maintains the ability to move simultaneously behind the scenes to check and re-check the choreography she has designed and put in place. Steal her away for a moment, and she will pause, look around, and take it all in. She will ask you what you think, not by way of challenge, but to commiserate with you in amazement. She’s quite confident that her piece of Wyoming ground, and the food produced upon it, is extraordinary. Chat with Deirdre long enough, and at some point she will also tell you she likes dirt. Healthy dirt. Dirt whose essence she can taste, and feel underneath her fingernails. She is a gourmand, yes, and a foodie to the hilt. But perhaps even more, she is a producer… a farmer and a rancher and a hunter for whom food is personal and eminently valuable.
Deirdre’s connection to food is just that, a connection, a marriage of people and place, plant, animal, soil, and human communities collected on common ground. Deirdre and her husband Rick purchased Sweetgrass at Thunderbasin in 2020 after they each sold businesses in the Denver area, Deirdre’s a catering and restaurant program that she’d run for fifteen years. Their goal was to procure and become stewards of a remote piece of Wyoming, one that held a diverse big game population that Deirdre and Rick could pursue in season. Indomitable hosts, the duo also harbored plans to build the ranch into a destination wingshooting operation, replete with full dining and lodging experience, on par with the finest in North America. Once those parameters were identified, Deridre and Rick embarked on a many-year search, landing eventually upon a 6000-acre parcel 45 miles from Gilette, and adjacent to the Thunderbasin Grassland. With the ink not yet dry on the purchase-and-sale, Deirdre let her dreams spill out on the landscape. “The first thing I did here was plan and put in a garden. There was no way that first growing season was going to arrive without me putting seeds in the ground,” she says with hallmark conviction. Seeds were sown that first spring and a farm quickly grew up around them. “Chickens, they say, are the gateway drug for farmers and ranchers,” she admits. Deirdre expanded the coops for eggs, and soon added ducks and Muscovies and Guinea fowl, pastured hens for meat. Goats were soon to follow, and a rabbitry. “I wanted items that were hard to find, meat and eggs and vegetables whose source I knew intimately, and in which I could taste the wind and the hills, the sun, and sweet grass for which the region is known and named. I wanted to create a flavor profile uniquely that of Northwest Wyoming.”
Deidre’s conviction in food emerged from a humble soils enriched with love and curiosity. Not long after 9/11, she found herself out of a job and home with a baby in Denver. The food network was a source of respite, and there she found Mario Batali, and his stories of eating in Italy. What struck Deirdre was the way Batali described the nuanced flavor of the Mediterranean, tomatoes that tasted markedly different as one ate them from north to south. Batali’s poetic reasoning communicated that winds off the ocean, surrounding woodlands, the minerality of a region’s soil imparted in that region’s ingredients a unique personality, one all its own and irrevocable. Inspired to write her own poetry, and unable to be restrained, Deirdre broke ground on a 5000 sq. ft. backyard garden and planted seeds. At the local Goodwill, she bought a stack of cookbooks for a dollar and taught herself to cook. Sunday nights became a celebration of flavor, and a platform for Deirdre to explore the food she was growing, and the flavors of her place. She went looking for her culinary voice and found it right there in her backyard, flavors she’d not known were possible before, meals in which she could taste her very care and curiosity. Friends and family were beneficiaries of her inspiration, and that too lent an intimacy to the process. Feeding people is, after all, among the most selfless acts of love.
Sunday dinners matured into a career in catering, food service, and hospitality. Deirdre honed her skills and exercised her curiosity. Simultaneously, she found a passion for hunting, and with her husband Rick began to travel extensively, largely to hunt and eat. In exploring the world she broadened her palate and discovered a food culture even more expansive, festooned with flavors of other places, the plants and creatures within them. She admits that she’s often tempted by the fruits and vegetables ripening in the remote, faraway gardens she passes, but claims to have thus far resisted hopping any fences in seed-seeking missions. “I always ask first,” she says by way of qualification, “but I usually wind up coming home with all sorts of wonderful seeds to test out back in my home garden.”
To call what she’s built a home garden is anathema. What Deirdre has created in the hills of Wyoming is better described as an ecosystem. She bends to her work and watches things grow, adding color and texture to landscape and plate as a painter would with oils. The ranch garden has grown with a 10,000 sq. foot expansion, an apiary, a worm farm, and dairy. There are visions of an on-site registered meat processing facility. This dry and hard place tucked away in the American West now hums with life, and it fascinates Deirdre. “It’s all a cycle, and growing,” she observes, her eyes sparkling and her cheeks sun-pinked. “Everything we do, everything we produce here, serves to give back to the land, to enhance the soils, the native plants, the wildlife. Rick and I are conservationists, and we believe in regenerative agriculture. We want nothing more than to make this place better with each passing season, and every action we take.” And in Deirdre’s eyes, “better” begins with healthy soil. Soil with a flavor all its own.
Perhaps that’s a bit of an understatement. Deirdre also wants something greater to emerge from her pastures and gardens, and certainly from the hunting experience that she and Rick work tirelessly to deliver. She doesn’t aspire to, but rather expects a revelatory experience. She wants a culinary program described by rustic elegance, one inspired to surprise and delight her guests. She wants the setting of each meal to celebrate the canvas upon which it is delivered, sage-scented and starlit wherever possible. And she wants to ensure that her guests leave surprised, delighted, and cognizant that a bit of Wyoming’s particular terroir lives on upon their tongues.
That early autumn evening, in Sweetgrass at Thunderbasin’s resplendent outdoor dining room, we stood beside the fire drinking craft cocktails and throwing lariats at a roping dummy. Lodge staff circled about, offering paper cones of duck fat caramel popcorn with bacon, skewered rounds of rabbit and rattlesnake sausage. At some point the chuck wagon bell was rung, and guests queued up to heap their plates with slow-smoked pig and goat, cast-iron beans, watermelon-feta salad, African Peri-Peri sauce, grilled sweetcorn on the cob. We sat down and tucked into a Cowboy’s culinary idyll and filled our senses with all that such a meal holds in store. At some point, I went searching for a napkin gone rogue, and turned away from the meal long enough to catch a glimpse of Deirdre Wildman at another table, leaning back in her chair, a glass of wine in one hand. She was looking around at all of us, smiling, I hope recognizing the gift that she had offered. I’m quite certain she could see and feel and taste and smell the sunset, the pine, the dust, the end of summer. She seemed a fixture up there, yet another essential piece of a flavor profile all its own.
First Published in Covey Rise Magazine
