Play yard

Couple lets imagination run wild throughout pet-centered property

The front yard looks like a log fort and a children's castle collided.

Wavy log walls. A house and kennel in the middle. An aluminum-topped turret. A trellised enclosure here. A rock garden there.

Knick-knacks everywhere.

Cluttered, but structured.

It catches your eye as you drive by on U.S. 93.

Caleb and Traci Stolte's 's two acres - a blended home and pet-care business called Stolte's Pet Stop - sit on the highway's west side, halfway between Kalispell and Whitefish. The business provides boarding, bathing and drop-off day care for cats and dogs.

The Stoltes' love of animals is evident throughout their yard and home-based business. A claw-foot bathtub used to bathe dogs is the centerpiece of their living room. Every wall surface is covered with paintings and imagery of dogs and cats. Dog sculptures and dog-themed doormats greet customers.

Their yard - much of it hidden from the highway - constantly changes its appearance.

It's an evolutionary thing.

"It's all morphing over time," Caleb said.

Good ideas grow from something simple into something complicated. Bad ideas lead to projects that then wither and die. Some ideas incubate for a while and become something else. Sometimes, the raw materials are there, waiting for some random thoughts to mesh into an idea.

Rocks and driftwood and logs and mud and plants and salvaged junk and curios become artistic expressions on the Stoltes' land.

Much of this is raw creative energy - more Caleb's with a dash of Traci's.

It's a gigantic artistic work with the final picture sort of vaguely germinating in their heads to be reached sometime far, far away.

"It's almost like a spiritual thing. I mean art and creativity come from that level," Caleb said.

"I don't really value the end product as much as most people do. … To me, that [a finished project] is kinda scary. I live the most in the process of creating," he said.

Caleb and Traci, both 33, are native Montanans who have been married for almost 12 years. He's a former professional mountain biker and physical therapist. She's a former X-ray technician who stills works part-time in that field.

They have a daughter, Luna, 4, a son, Azure, 21 months, and a dog, Reishi, a mutt with lots of Manchester terrier in him.

For a long time, they lived in a yurt - a round, sort-of-portable structure of nomadic Asian origin - in the Flathead. They were friends with Kathy Kramer, the previous owner of the kennel and pet-care shop on U.S. 93. She hired them to look after the business, with an option to buy it later.

Four years ago, they bought it. The business thrives today.

Two years, Caleb received a load of interesting rocks for his help with a job. He and Traci formed them into a rock garden - their first yard creation.

Meanwhile, he collected curious-appearing pieces of driftwood and odd chunks of this and that - just because they looked neat.

"If you can't tell, I'm a pack rat," he said.

The Stoltes then thought their front yard looked too flat; it needed something vertical to spice it up.

So he built an 8-foot-tall wood-trellised enclosure with the idea of planting a garden inside. So far, a stone path leads into it and a partly finished "black oven" of mud and bricks is inside. With a black oven, a fire is lit and later put out inside it, with the heat trapped to cook the food. Eventually, vines will cover the trellises.

Then last fall, Caleb attended a two-week workshop on permaculture, which captured his imagination.

Conceived in the 1970s in Australia, permaculture is a philosophical approach to combining food production, landscaping, architecture and ecology into a symbiotic relation with the earth and nature.

The Stoltes want to eventually grow their own food in a garden. And they use mostly organic materials in building an extra straw-bale house and jazzing up their yard - with the idea that all the materials will eventually return to and refresh the earth. And they like the concept of using natural resources for their materials.

So Caleb kept collecting raw material - stone, wood, leftover items and so on - and creating with it in their yard.

"Caleb finds the stuff he's going to build with, but he doesn't know what he's going to build," Traci said.

"A lot of this I don't know what it'll be. It just kinda happens," he said.

Caleb ended up with a massive amount of firewood as payment for helping a friend. He decided to make the log-fort-like wall that passers by see from the highway.

But to make it more interesting, he made the top of the wall wavy.

"Nothing is straight in Caleb's life," Traci said.

The Stoltes put little windows in the log fence-wall that are filled with stain glass and stone sculptures. Traci also sprinkled the yard with curios such as spiky metal cats and dogs.

Caleb set a huge driftwood log that branched Y-like into two trunks vertically into the log wall as the base for a castle turret, topped by aluminum sheeting.

The side yard has a gong in a homemade ornate structure, a multi-layered rebuilt deck and an overhauled wood-fire-heated hot tub.

Farther back is a rock arch - held together by rebar and epoxy - that is the Stoltes' memorial to a friend who died in an avalanche. Two ice axes stick into the arch.

Even farther back are other projects too numerous to go into.

The couple share business and family chores. Traci contributes some ideas to the yard art. But Caleb tackles most of the actual yard work.

He works on one thing until he get bored and then works on another, which is why several pieces are partly finished.

Traci supports Caleb's ideas and loves to see the results.

"I never tell him 'no' [to an idea]," she said.

"I wanted to buy a bigger gong and she wouldn't let me," Caleb said.

" For God's sake, it was $800," Traci replied.

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com