Castle Rock Ranch

Name: Castle Rock Ranch
Address: 12718 Old River Road, Kingston, ID, 83839, US
Telephone: +12086829537
Price range: $$
Rating: 4.4

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United States
Kingston, ID
Castle Rock Ranch

Grass finished beef, Weddings, and Overnight ranch camp for girls 10 - 14 on our ranch on the North Fork of the Coeur D'alene River.

We love Farm to Table Food, Farming, Outdoor Fun, Horses, and Ranch Animals. Castle Rock Ranch Camp is a summer camp for girls surrounded by scenic mountains in the Panhandle National Forest in north Idaho. We're a summer camp with a food curriculum, located on a ranch with a mile of frontage on the Coeur D'Alene river. Kids ride horses and float down the river everyday, but also learn about ranch

animal care and growing food. The food we eat comes from the ranch: we have a one acre vegetable garden and over 100 blueberry bushes, strawberry plants, and a raspberry orchard, in addition to pasture-raised chickens, cows and goats. Kids help with ranch chores in the morning - milking the goats, collecting eggs, feeding the animals and harvesting from the garden - and have the opportunity to help in the kitchen if they're interested as well. Pick up available from Spokane Airport

12/11/2024

Things that make us happy…

Compost and wood chips - from the soil to the pasture and animal health to the finished beef they make everything better ✨

Pro tip: if you want to impress or gift any of the homesteading ladies in your life, get them some compost or wood chips. We’re simple creatures really - you can’t go wrong.

11/26/2024

Professional package inspector reporting for duty (or just looking good for treats). The only downside to a dog who wants to friends with everyone is the concern that she might just jump in someone else’s vehicle if the adventure smells good.

11/18/2024

Cold but cozy times are here…✨

11/12/2024

Have you ever really, really, REAAAAALLLLYY not wanted to do something? Yeah….

Sometimes we all ‘make mountains out of molehills’, or in this case maybe we ‘make raging rivers out of a tiny ditch with a trickle of water’. Yes, we got through it but not without dragging our human counterparts through the muddy trickle of ditch water 🤦🏻‍♀️

10/27/2024

You know when it’s a serene, misty fall evening and everyone is peacefully eating grass and settling in for the evening when suddenly you’re disrupted by primal cow noises (the low, guttural throat-moo they make when a perceived predator is nearby)? Is it a wolf? (One was recently spotted in the neighborhood 200 yards from the herd, so not a stretch). A cougar? A bear? A moose ? Our cows hate them when they get in their pasture…
Nope, just our domestic boar who escaped and thought he’d try multi species grazing and see what all this premium fall grass is about. The human observers in this situation very briefly thought about herding him home but decided that herding pigs is about as useful as herding cats or kids and decided to just watch the drama unfold. The boar stood his ground even when the milk cow got a wild hair and tried to charge him. Ultimately, he found his bovine neighbors very inhospitable and eventually waddled back to his lady-pig friends.

Side note: the horses, who are deathly afraid of pigs when they have a rider on their backs, even when these pigs are enclosed in a corral or fence, couldn’t care less about a pig at ankle-biting height on the loose in their pasture. 🤷🏻‍♀️

10/19/2024

Fall is just showing off this year …! ✨✨✨

10/11/2024

Watch out - it’s palomino camo season! They sneak up on you when they’re disguised in the golden grass of fall and then pursue.

10/05/2024

All the fall gold…

09/23/2024

When you’re too far away to get a cute portrait, so you get closer and realize that there’s no ‘cute’ to be had here as these rascals are young and majorly covered in cow manure, or just middle aged and grumpy.

Theses two get to have the best grass (and they need it because they’re either young and growing or older and high maintenance 😊)but they’re grazing with the cows we’re still putting weight on, which has some messy downsides.

09/17/2024

September is the golden hour of the year✨

Mild weather, gorgeous skies, the bounty of the grass-growing season showing up as fat on the back of the cattle that we’ve been working hard to get there 😅

05/31/2024

Join us for a burger night at Castle Rock Ranch, Saturday, June 29th! We’re the second dinner in part of a series called Food as Farmacy put on by naturopathic Dr Casey Carr. There will be burgers, homemade buns and all the toppings, maybe some cute animals, definitely some feral kids (yours are welcome too) and an hour long ranch tour (mostly an opportunity to listen to Albert talk about the meat we raise, which is actually about the cows, which is actually about the grass, which is actually about the soil, which is actually about the microbes and how it all connects to us which is life-changing). 🤯 Seriously though, we love talking about food and how beef raised well is actually nutrient-dense medicine, which is what Dr Casey’s ‘Food as Farmacy’ dinner series is all about.

Lots more info at foodasfarmacy.com and tickets for our burger night are available at our link in bio, or here : https://app.barn2door.com/cdariverbeef/all

Feel free to DM me with any questions. Hope to see you there!

05/03/2024

I’ve been told it’s world naked gardening day - but I think we’ll just stick to moving compost to the garden in the usual north Idaho wardrobe of men’s thrift store attire that makes you look like a muddy marshmallow. Please follow along here for all the most inspirational homesteading/ranch fashion. ✨

04/27/2024

Always building…

and sometimes supervising! Someone’s gotta do it, right?

04/22/2024

Trying to get ourselves tuned up for the season but really we just want to nap in the sun ☀️

04/07/2024

You know the cows are super disappointed in the humans when they line up and give you ‘the look’.

To be fair, normally when they hear the skid steer fire up, it’s bringing them something delicious (alfalfa). This time it just brought a bucket of small humans intent on picking up rocks out of their pasture.

This is time of year when the animals are feeling frisky and impatient - waiting for grass to grow, calves to drop, horses to shed, the ground to dry out - but the humans are busy getting the infrastructure ready for a smooth transition to our busiest seasons.

✨✨✨

03/07/2024

After the brief season of ‘fake spring,’ we’re back in ‘winter’s last gasp’ (maybe last, you never know !) - and you won’t hear us complaining! This month’s snow is a little more insurance for us against drought, a little more protection against summer wildfires, a little more water banked up in the mountains to slowly melt and flow down to the river to help keep us all cool in the dog days of August. This fresh batch of snow is also protecting the pastures from damage from animal impact. You can still smell spring in the air and the robins are investigating the area, wondering whether it’s okay to nest yet. The animals with fur are all starting to shed and everyone is acting a little frisky - it may not look like spring this week but they can sense the oncoming wave of green grass in their bones.

02/01/2024

January weekends are for making jerky! We sell all our premium beef, so what ends up in our own freezer is the not so premium beef and right now, a lot of offal. A few times a year, we grind hearts, livers, cheeks and other random cuts we have lurking around in the freezer and make jerky. It’s a great way to get the nutrient power house of organ meats into our kids because otherwise they can be pretty squeamish about them.

(Not pictured in the process is the jerky gun which transforms the ground beef/organs into pretty little orderly lines).

01/13/2024

Resilience / Gratitude

We don’t make resolutions - they’re a good way to disappoint yourself. But I’ve been thinking a lot about a word for the year (.winger ‘s recommendation). For 2023, it would have to have been ‘resilience.’ We survived a hurricane of unfortunate events, accidents and feelings that probably would have destroyed us 5 years ago : injuries, surgeries, and spending an entire growing season of my waning prime on crutches; livestock loss from heat waves, cold snaps and just plain bad luck; deaths of multiple beloved grandmothers; and catastrophic animal loss that represented everything we’ve been working toward for the last ten years. There is so much joy in a life spent with animals but it will also completely gut you when you least expect it.

On the flip side, 2024’s word of the year is ‘gratitude.’ We’re beyond grateful that we’re still here, that we get to live in this stunning place (even when it’s negative 20 degrees and feels Arctic like today), that we have a cozy house to stay warm in and plan for the season ahead, that we have plenty of organic alfalfa/grass hay to keep the cows’ and horses’ bellies full to be able to withstand the hardships of extreme weather, that we’re all healthy and capable of achieving and fighting for the future and the life we want to live. And we’re beyond grateful for the people who choose to spend time with us, in all the ways ✨

Here’s to 2024 and winter reflection - Happy New Year⭐️✨❄️

Address

12718 Old River Road
Kingston, ID
83839

Telephone

+12086829537

Website

http://www.cdariverranch.com/

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We’re offering trail rides for the last few weeks of summer and probably into September. Come ride with us! Also -side note- why is it glamorous (and called frosting) when a middle aged buckskin horse has grey hairs mixed in with their black mane and not glamorous on humans ? -asking for a friend- Feel free to DM us here with questions and visit our website for details and booking info: www.cdariverranch.com look for the ‘trail rides’ button