Glacier National Park! Natures Wonderland of Majestic Beauty! Camping Hiking & Firebox Stove Cooking

We are on our way to Glacier National Park. We've never been there. We're going as a family. Spur of the moment decision. We're just, we're doing a road trip. We're going to Montana. We just stopped here. We're at this beautiful river. We were just driving. We waited till we got tired. We're like, ah, let's find a place. And this is what we found. It's absolutely beautiful. So we're going to spend the night here. It's just going to be a quick, you know, place to sleep. And then we're going to hit the road in the morning and head straight to Glacier. I've got the Chevy all set up for camping. We wanted to travel light. We didn't want to have the trailer. We wanted to have everything contained within the truck. And so I had Vanya help me, and we put this little deck on the back of the truck. We've got the rooftop tent. We've got awnings. We are ready. And here we see my father hooking up the ladder. We made it. We are at Glacier National Park. And look at that view out in the distance. Holy smokes. What do you think, son? This is amazing. You say it's not too cold? We're on the Rocky Point Trail headed to the Rocky Point. See ya. We are up in this campground up in the thick, thick forest. Probably the thickest forest I've ever camped in. We're going to go find our campsite and get set up. It's about seven o'clock in the evening. I'm here in the campground. Jess and Luke are down paddleboarding down at the lake. But I have this big 12 ounce tenderloin that I thought I'd cook up. And I saw a post recently where the guy made what he called steak bites that looked really delicious and flavorful because it was smaller bits that were just totally coated in this wonderful garlic sauce. So I thought I'm going to make those with that 12 ounce tenderloin that I had. So let's get the five inch firebox out. We will cut our steak up into bite-sized square pieces. Just small enough that they'll cook fast, but I'll still be able to cook them to a medium rare temperature. It's pretty important that these pieces be nice and dry. So I'm going to put them here on this paper towel. Garlic salt. Coat these really well in this garlic salt. Let's get our griddle smoking hot. That's why we call it the ember glow diffuser plate. Look at that thing. It's red hot. This pan is extremely hot. Jess and Luke came back so I got talking to them and it got a little hotter than I wanted it to get, but we're going to go for it. We've got the beef tallow here. I'm going to put it on. Yeah, that is literally smoking hot. Let's take some of this back out. I don't think I need much. Let's not let it smoke too long before we get the steak bites in there. The steak will absorb some of that heat. I got to keep these things moving. Oh yeah. I'm going to take these off the heat. Let them rest. All right. To make a little sauce with these drippings, I'm going to add some cream. The guy in the video I watched actually used butter, but I thought cream might be pretty good. That'll deglaze the pan a little bit. You guys ready to taste these? Oh yeah. Let's drizzle our sauce on there just like that. Then we can just kind of rub it around in that sauce as we all take bites. See if we got any pinkness. Oh yeah. We got plenty of pinkness going on. That's beautiful. I think they turned out about perfect. Look at that babe. Pinkness. Yeah. Perfect medium rare. Oh yeah. What do you think? We're going to finish up this dinner and hit it hard tomorrow. All right buddy. We better get going. We got lots of places to go. Oh that's pretty cool. The river is beautiful. What a spot, huh? Very cool. We're climbing. There's our first glacier. Then if we rotate. Hey bud. Wow. It just goes way down there. What a spot, huh? Holy smokes. And then down there we've got the big beautiful blue lake. Man, this place is incredible. Beauty everywhere. Ready for adventure. We just got to hike up this road to the trailhead. Wow. Gorgeous. Yes, he's mine. Me and my boy. Waterfall. I couldn't see you. You weren't in the shot. Do it again. A waterfall. Never mind. Little squirrel. Oh he's cute. Come here little buddy. Come here. Do it. Is it icy? Yeah I'll bet. Let's peek under the bridge. I'll bet it's so cold. You ready to get in Luke? All right what's next? It's like you see the same mountains but you just see them from different angles and it's so cool. You're like is that like because we're in front you're like is that like a fin on the back or what? That one's that same formation. Can you see that flat with it coming out? It's cool when we were sitting at the edge of the lake yesterday because those rocks were so colorful and then up on the shore they were just kind of like Luke don't do it. Just about lost you to the fishes. Let's go hit the trail. What a cutie. There he goes. We just saw a ferret or a weasel. It wasn't a marmot. No it's not a marmot because marmot would be like a woodchuck. We just saw a pine martin. I tried to get video of it but I don't know if I was successful or not. Hopefully I did. It was amazing. We didn't know what it was but we passed another lady who seemed knowledgeable and she thought it was probably a pine martin. That guy was really cute. Yeah that was fun. This is the viewpoint for Virginia Falls. Luke is looking on with amazement. Pretty cool. Oh really? Oh wow this is the best one so far. The other way is Virginia Falls viewpoint. I thought that's what this was. Oh my gosh. Oh that's rad. Yeah that's cool and apparently we can get up there a little higher and get a little bit of a closer view. We're on our way back down to the truck but it has started raining. It's been a beautiful day for hiking. Nice and cool and it's raining just so softly that it's not even bothersome. Quite nice. This is what St. Mary Falls looks like in the rain. A lot less people here. Nice. Wow they're crazy. Wow they're clear over there. That was awesome. The cloudy version. It's pretty awesome. We're having a picnic in the back of the truck. They're not cut because it's raining. Living it up in the back of the truck. We just made a boo-boo. We pulled in here and I was looking at the sign as we pulled in. It said 179 which is our site. Pulled in. We got all set up and then I was walking around the outside and I bumped into this other sign that says 177. So we've got to pull up stakes and move. So it'll be a minute before we start dinner. A few moments later. We have relocated and it's time to make some calazones. Like you put it between your knees. Mucho more musical. Okay so we're just deep frying with the deep five-way cast iron. So I'm just gonna set up the firebox. We don't need the sumo system. We don't need the extra stability. So we're just gonna go quick and easy and we're gonna be using gas. So I'm gonna set some of this stuff to the side. We're under this awning which is making it a little bit dark but we've got some lights set up. Our deep fryer basket. Just like that. We have our fryer basket clip that goes in the handle. Avocado oil going in. I'm just gonna put it all in. Calazones and then maybe we'll make some pies. We have some cream cheese. We have some blueberries. Okay Jess is mixing up some ricotta. Some garlic salt. She wanted me to grind pepper into it. Yeah shredded mozzarella right here. Pesto. This will be a filling and then you're gonna put your sauce over it. Yeah or like put some sauce in a bowl and then we can dip in the mozzarella. I'm gonna set this over on the table. You think you like this flavor mom's making? I might put some sauce in there. Okay so there's our pizza dough on the pie maker. I'm gonna turn this heat down just a little bit so that it won't cook too fast. So ricotta, mozzarella, pesto, garlic salt, garlic salt, pepper, red pepper flakes. Squeeze it. Okay squeeze it hard. I think it's okay. It'll taste the same. Oh that temperature looks about right. Looks pretty good. All right there's your food. What do you think? Is it hot in the middle? Yeah. We added a little more pesto to the mix. I really like pesto a lot so so let's try that much. I think we can make that work. Maybe just a little bit more. Little baby pepperonis. Just a little bit of water. Hopefully you'll be able to get it to stick a little better. Turn the oil down. Hoping that we can get this a little hotter before it gets quite so brown. Let's see if we can get that to come out and I'm hoping it stays sealed up. Let's see if that water trick did the trick. Just like that. To give you an idea of the flame size I thought I would just show you real quick what that flame looked like. Let's turn it over. Yeah this is about the perfect temperature babe. Excellent. It's gonna be good. I think this one is done. I'm gonna let it drain. Lukey we probably will have enough for one more of these. Let's put some sauce on it. I think I'm just gonna kind of spread this sauce out in front of it. Now we need a fresh piece of basil to put on there. Oh yeah. We should have gotten some basil. My dinner is complete. Let's give this a taste. Nice crunch. Let's see if I got it nice and hot inside. Wow. Your mix is very good. Is it good? Yeah. Nope. It's very good. Oh yeah. That's delicious. I think doing the sauce on the outside is perfect. Oh there's the pepperoni. It's good. We're gonna get our calzones eaten and then we'll make some dessert. Jessica made us a filling right here that consists of cream cheese, cinnamon, and sugar with some brown sugar. She said it kind of tastes a little bit cheesecakey. This is puff pastry. We're planning on topping it with a little bit of caramel sauce. So this should be interesting. I'm just gonna set that there. And because it is so sweet I'm not gonna put a ton of filling in it. You know blueberries would be good on this too. Yeah it would be. Yeah we could do raspberries and blueberries on top. That'd be good. Okay. I think it'll squeeze together just fine. But I am going to squeeze it pretty hard to make sure it is sealed up good. Gently let it kind of fall into your hand. Just like that. I think our dessert pie is done. Let's do some caramel sauce. A little bit more cinnamon sugar. A little dusting. I'm just gonna put all these raspberries on here. Let's just eat them up. It's a garnish. All right let's try it. Yeah that's very good. The raspberries were a very good idea. Oh there's this. There's the filling. I can see it now. I don't know if I got any with the last bite but there was enough other good stuff on it that it didn't matter. Let's try. Oh it's so cute. Let's try this one. Luke made a baby pie. Is there anything in it? It's just a blueberry. A blueberry. Look at that. One blueberry. It's a little pie. Single blueberry pie. Here baby you want to go ahead and try this? Yeah it's pretty good huh? Yeah that filling you made is good. It's so beautiful. You put whipped cream on it. Single blueberry. Okay let's see how it goes. Tastes like a blueberry. It's hot. Yeah that's really good. Yeah we're gonna need another one of those. Is that your first bite buddy? What do you think? It's good huh? All right we're gonna make another one. And then we're gonna go to bed. We're tired. We hiked a lot today. We saw a lot of cool stuff though. Really cool. It was awesome. Baby mountain goat. Pine martin. And I found out that I don't have to have a Montana fishing license to fish within the park. Anyway we'll see you guys in the morning. Since we were missing the goats so much we came to this goat lick overlook. Apparently this is where the nanny goats will come because they're depleted of minerals and they will lick the rocks to get all the minerals that they need. Did you see any goats? No I didn't even get to the rock yet. I knew you were recording. Can I have your phone? So here's a picture of a goat but the actual goats, the actual goats are way across and like to the eye they're just tiny little dots. Sorry not going to be able to show you guys any goats. I saw one about that's what they look like. The goats were a bust but we are going to this other lake where I'm hoping I can fish a little bit. I don't know if I'll be able to catch any fish but I thought it'd be fun to throw a line in. We are in East Glacier now and we were worried it wasn't going to be nearly as magnificent but honestly it might be even better. The deep water is just a little too far out and I'm fighting a headwind so I'm going to try to find a different spot. The life I love is making miles with my friends. We're your family. And I can't wait to get on the trail again. We're on the trail. Cool. Those people just told us there's a moose ahead so we better keep an eye out. Wow great view right there huh? We've been in the forest in the trees. Look how many wildflowers are right here. I'm going to zoom in on. Someone was just in the wildflower. Someone? Something. Oh it's like screwing around. Oh that's okay. Oh the deep water is a little bit closer here. Yeah that's pretty close. Lukey can you see that waterfall up there? They come all the way down from up top if you follow it. I wonder if they're not out as We can hear it. We've got to be close. Wow. Hey buddy. There it is. That's pretty cool. We're hiking up to the top of the waterfall. It just keeps going and going. So beautiful. Wow those rocks are amazing. Yeah we could do a scone. We're doing a little climb here up to a viewpoint that we're hoping is going to be worth the work. This is a pretty good little climb. We think that mountain there in front of us is rising wolf but we're not sure. Six thousand plus elevation but four thousand plus above the valley floor. Looks like we made it. I think this is the top. There's the lake we were at. Let's zoom in. The trees are still blocking some stuff This trail goes up just a little bit further. We'll see if we can see past some of these trees. I guess if it were morning then that mountain would be lit up more and we'd be able to see its detail a little bit better. It's kind of in a shadow right now. That's where all the action is. It's down in there. I'd like to get closer to some of that. Then if we get around this tree we've got what we think is rising wolf. We left Luke down at the waterfall. He didn't want to do the climb so we'll go get him and head back to the truck. Look at that. That's pretty awesome. Where's that spiky? Oh that's spiky. Oh it is the end of a fin that looked like it was just a like a spire but it was a was the end of a fin that I was seeing. Yeah pretty cool. We had a gentleman tell us that there's a moose down here. Oh yeah there's a moose all right. Holy smokes. I hope you can see this in the video. Big old, oh sticking his head completely under the water. Oh yeah he's awesome. He's just munching it down. So they told us there was this bull here and then further up that there was a cow. That is so cool. There's another moose over there. I'm trying to get a shot up but she's mostly under the water splashing around. We made it back to the campground and you'll notice we're in a different campsite because we made the reservations only a week ago. We had to move to a different campsite every night so that's just a tip. You know you need to reserve your sites early if you want to stay in the same site every night. Otherwise you just have to take what's available. Still worth it though. Yeah totally worth it and we would have packed up basically anyway. Yeah with the way yeah the way we were camping. So tonight we are going to make Frito Tacos and they are kind of dear to my heart because my mom always made them when I was a kid but we called them Olay's and they were one of my favorite meals that my mom would make. I'm going to be using this with the side burner brackets and with the hangover sticks. So I'm going to set up the side burner brackets. Fairly low I think. I'm going to cook the hamburger over on this side. Switch that around. I'm going to use the high fire sticks right here. This is going to be where I cook the meat. Actually I'm going to use a diffuser plate on both because I want this heat to spread out because I'm going to be doing it in the frying pan right here. And that will be for our beans. Luke is cutting up our onions and garlic for us. I'm going to do one can of black beans in the box pot. Add a little salt to our beans. Just throw that lid on there while we got it handy and I'm going to turn on the gas. I'm going to turn it way down so we want this to heat up slowly. You know we have the root beer. Once again we're going to be cooking with some beef tallow. Let's get some of that in there. I haven't actually seen the sumo system in action before. It's nice. Yeah pretty cool. Lots of options. I'm using it as a two burner stove tonight. All right let's get our onions in first. That seems about right. A little bit more. Let's give these onions and garlic one more stir and I think we can go ahead and add our beef. We've got a refrigerator so we can take it home if we need to. Yeah that's going to be a full pan. I'm going to put a little bit of adobo. I'll put this seasoning. Delicious taco seasoning. Gotta give it a pretty good dose of that. That'll be good. Cool. All right come here. Taco meat on top just like that. And then so the cheese on top of the hot meat and then we'll go with the beans on top of the cheese. We'll just give that cheese every chance to melt we can. That's gonna be good. Lettuce. Not so much lettuce. I'm not a rabbit. That doesn't serve up quite as nice as the squeezer does it? It's not as cooperative. No. Here it is salsa casera. Black olives because that's how my mom used to make it. A little guacamole. There we go. Frito tacos. For my birthday I would always ask for Olay. Olay. Olay. My cheese is nice and melty. That's good. Luke is mixing us up some brownies. Oh yeah. But we're adding these caramel bits that are really really good. Yeah. Give me a few of those. You already got this oil in? Yep. We're going to be cooking these with the 10 inch ultra cook kit. I've got the deep cowboy plate but I'm just going to use some cooking spray here. So that looks really good buddy. Good job. Thanks. I don't know if we need to put any more caramel on top but I guess if mom says so. We've got the 10 inch fry pan. We will put in the pizza stone for thermal mass and then this pan goes in on top and then we put the cowboy plate on top as the lid. Just like that. Something like that. I can be a little more precise with the tongs and we'll let it work. They've been running for about 10 minutes. I'm just going to pull them out to just see how things are going. So let's just set them here and wow look at that. It's getting pretty brown on the bottom so I don't think we need any heat on the bottom for a minute and I'm just going to let them work from above. We'll probably give them about another I don't know maybe 10 more minutes. We've been running 10 minutes with it on the coals and then 10 minutes out here with just the hot coals on top so I think it might be done. I'm just going to lift this off for a second. Let's poke our little stick in. Did it come up dirty? I can't see good enough. Did it come up? It's a little darker. It's still doughy? It's a bit doughy yeah. I think it's so close. I think if we just put the lid back on it and just let it rest then it will be good. Let's just scoop out a little bit. It is super hot so it's not going to even stay in shape. The goo is what makes it good. Some whipped cream. I like whipped cream. Does that look good? Yeah. All right me too. All right let's try it. It's good. We went down this little dirt road not really knowing what we would find. When we looked on the map it does go to some really cool places but you can see up ahead of me the road is closed. It's open to biking and hiking but there is a cool little creek right here that we're just going to go play around with. Now that we've driven in we may as well have some fun while we're here. I'm going to put a spinner on. This is a spinner that I found so if I catch fish it'll be that much sweeter. Catch a fish. Oh I got one. Wow. I can't believe I caught a fish. Hey I caught a fish at Glacier. Where's mom? Oh that's cool. Right away too. Oh I'm getting I got another one. They're just little. That is so fun. There it goes. We're gonna paddle back to the truck and we're gonna say goodbye to Glacier National Park. We've had a fantastic time here and I hope we've been able to capture just a small amount of just how awesome and wonderful this place really is. Thank you all for watching and we'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.