Michael Jamison did a nice article on John Frederick's pending retirement and the changing of the guard at the North Fork Hostel. It appeared in the Monday, October 15, 2007 online edition of the Missoulian . . .
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.
Read the entire article . . .