Montana Gone Luxe

Tent City dwellers can admire looming cliffs over the Blackfoot, including a standout perch creatively nicknamed Lookout Rock. A family of bald eagles nests nearby—locals date their enormous nest to the 1930s—and lucky guests might spy the adult female returning from the river with dinner still wriggling in her talons. An on-site “camping butler” stokes the coals for nightly campfire sessions, complete with s’mores and storytelling. On clear nights, campers stargaze using a high-powered telescope; on dreary ones, the camp butler shows movies on a canvas screen. The whole scene might remind you of summer camp, if maybe your summer camp was run by Rocco Forte.

Though Tent City décor is, by necessity, a tad less opulent than its solid-wall counterparts’, the service factor is, if anything, amped up. My camp butler was Mark, a neighborly and utterly obliging La Crosse native who practically begged me to put him to work. If you like opening your own beer, Mark will let you, but he won’t necessarily be happy about it. Meals are made to order in a small dining pavilion, and the fridge is stocked with snacks and cold drinks. On a night when I found myself the only citizen of Tent City, a bellman nonetheless drove over from the main property to deliver an unsolicited plate of milk and cookies.

On-call shuttles bring Tent City and Morris Farmhouse guests to the main dining facilities, where Tank & Trough bistro serves strong drink and casual breakfast and lunch fare. The real dining location at Paws Up, though, is Pomp, the resort’s fine-dining restaurant. Seasonal and regionally sourced ingredients dominate the menu, and standouts on my early summer visit included smoky-sweet Kurobuta pork from an Idaho producer, just-picked asparagus sautéed with shallots, and a huckleberry bread pudding (huckleberries being the characteristically undomesticated Montanan equivalent of Georgia peaches or Florida oranges). Timber beams and slate floors recall Pomp’s days as a feed barn for hungry ranch hands, but today’s diners sit in high-backed leather chairs and rest crystal glasses upon white tablecloths. If you’re in the mood to nest, in-home chefs will prepare meals in your cabin kitchen on twenty-four hours’ notice. Yessir, the ranch hands never had it so good.

Brian Kevin writes about adventure travel for away.com and is the author of The Compass American Guide to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, forthcoming from Fodor’s in spring of 2009.