Kevin and Cindie Fugere

The Figure’s and their son, Ian, ranch and manage the Camel’s Hump Lodge near Sentinel Butte, ND

Kevin
Here on the homeplace, this is where we raise all our feed for cattle, and we winter all of our cattle here, and we background all of our calves.

Prairie Public
What’s the rest of your ranching operation?

Kevin
The ranch at Sentinel Butte is all of our summer grass. We take ‘em up there usually late May, bring ‘em home oh the last part of the year.

Prairie Public
Tell me about how you got into ranching.

Kevin
Well I grew up here. This was a farm/ranch operation, and I always liked the ranching part of it most. After high school, the late 70s was the oil boom here in western North Dakota, and I worked the oil field for probably 15 years and built a cow herd in the meantime and then started looking for a ranch for a home and pasture instead of leasing and found the ranch up at Sentinel Butte.

Prairie Public
Were you guys married at the time?

Kevin
No.

Prairie Public
Tell me about the lodge and how that all came to be.

Cindie
When Kevin bought the land in 1994, there was a farmstead, and there were about five out buildings and an old house that hadn’t been lived in for probably six or seven years. And it sat there for awhile, and then he tried to rent it to some people. The first renter used the house as a dog kennel. He no longer lived there, just left his dogs there. And the second renters were honestly more like gypsies, and they filled the whole house up with furniture and clothes and then left by dark of night. So the old place was half full to the ceiling, and we had to decide to either tear it down, burn it down, or fix it up. I had been to a couple of market place events and had learned a little bit about bed and breakfasts and decided that maybe we should consider something like that. I had quit working, and Kevin thought it would be a good thing for me to do, to take on a small enterprise that would allow us to work out of our home. So I spent a couple summers fixing it up, hired a few contractors to do a little work, and now it’s an old farmhouse that we call a guest home.

Prairie Public
It didn’t take a lot to get it into this kind of shape it is today?

Cindie
I had some spare time to work on it. It took a lot of scraping and painting and cleaning and hauling out all that old junk. Fixing up the exterior we took on as our own project. And so that was my own time, but I figured that made the labor cheap. The expensive part was the water, the sewer, the roof, and then it was old plaster inside, and that had to be boarded over, had to be refinished and so we had a contractor for that. The sum total of the project was something like $25,000. It wasn’t terribly expensive to get this old place up and running. It’s not fancy, but it’s very comfortable.

Prairie Public
It’s a beautiful place. It’s a beautiful setting.

Cindie
Well we think so because it was always our escape from the farm where work was very intense and never done. When you went up to check the cattle, you took the time to watch the sunset, and I guess that’s how we came to realize maybe other people would love it, because we did. It’s the transition between prairie and badlands. Lots of beautiful hardwood draws and rolling hills, scoria and clay and green grass—good contrast of colors and wide open spaces. And at night there’s nothing prettier than Camel’s Hump because there’s no light for miles, and so you see the night stuff.

Prairie Public
How did you come to name it Camel’s Hump?

Kevin
When I bought the ranch, they had it listed as Camel’s Hump Ranch. Our property runs up to the bottom of the camel’s hump. It’s a butte right by the interstate on the Sentinel Butte interchange. And there’s a camel’s hump dam right alongside the road too. Camel’s Hump’s a local landmark.

Prairie Public
How is the lodge business going?

Cindie
Well, I’d have to say that the Internet’s a really effective tool for us. We have gotten a large number of customers from that. We get a lot of inquiries by telephone and by email, and I think it’s going good. My goal was if I could get a guest or a group in each good month of the year, May through September, I’d be happy, and we’ve ended up with about 12. And we have inquiries for next year, and so I think that’s pretty good for a kick-off year.

Prairie Public
And what do people do there? Do you have families or just hunters?

Cindie
Our goal was families, but it didn’t turn out that way. We were on a prairie dog hunting list that the Convention and Visitors Bureau puts out to people that inquire with them so we ended up with a half dozen hunting groups in May and June. That was a big boon to us, and they were really wonderful people, just almost all guys. One fellow and his children, and these guys that like to come and spend a weekend together. The hunting for some was really serious, and for some it was just an opportunity to see each other again because they came from different places around the country. They were clean and polite and really wonderful guests.

Prairie Public
Any trouble with having people in the middle of your cattle affair?

Kevin
No. Everyone seems to really be conscious of the livestock, and so far the people we’ve had there have all been real respectful people. The only thing that happened was this year was the first party there had a problem and didn’t have a toilet plunger. I happened to be up there fencing that day, and so I ran over to the neighbors and borrowed a toilet plunger. The next day I took one up from home here. As far as I can think of, that’s the only important thing that was forgotten.

Prairie Public
Tell me a little bit about how ranching and farming have changed…

Kevin
Oh man. It’s so fast-paced, and you have to be so big. You have to try and manage and operate so many acres and so many head of cattle to make a living now compared to when I was a kid. I mean people struggled when I was a kid too, but it just seemed like a slower pace. And we didn’t have to operate such big places.

There’s very few people that don’t have an outside income anymore, no matter how big their ranch is or how many cattle they feed. You just don’t find very many people that don’t have an off-farm job.

Prairie Public
What’s it mean to you Cindie to be able to be here and not have to be driving back and forth to a job elsewhere?

Cindie
Well I guess I’ve lived both lives. I worked in Bismarck for three years and commuted back and forth to the farm on the weekends, and then it just seemed more like fun because Kevin would save working the cattle till the weekend when I was gonna be home. The house was cleaner when I wasn’t here than it is when I am here full-time. It’s a big sacrifice because the thing…there’s so many temptations today. You want to join clubs, you want to be a part of civic communities, but in order to operate a large operation like this, you need to be married to your operation. You have to be home. So to be off the farm to earn cash is almost convoluted. It’s the wrong thing to do. You may earn a little cash, but fences will decline and buildings will decline, and things won’t get done. It’s a big operation. It takes all of us. Kevin made it a laborer, and I’m happy to be here and be one.

Prairie Public
Is it a lot better having somebody here to help you on a regular basis?

Kevin
Oh yeah. It’s getting to where it’s impossible to do it all yourself. We usually hire a high school kid every summer for part-time help, but the rest of the year it’s just Cindie, Ian and me… we have more than enough to do.

Prairie Public
Is Ian liking life on a ranch?

Cindie
Well sometimes he does, but in a class of 14 in Belfield, he is the only full-time rancher, and so the temptations of his classmates of being in town and riding your bike and going to the pool everyday are there. But I think overall he loves it. He just takes it for granted the life that he has, the freedom that he has, to walk out his door or take care of his pheasants, or go riding with his dad.

Prairie Public
What are your hopes about your ranch?

Kevin
Well we hope to pay enough debt down to where we can live comfortably, taking a vacation once a year, to build Cindie a new house. I mean we all want a new house. I want one too.

Cindie
It is a long-term goal, but this business is very cash demanding. This business is a sacrifice financially because everything that you make you put back into it, and the profit margins are minimal, and the debt load is intense at all times of the year, especially when you own land but also all the inputs you put into the crops and the cattle, and so you have to like to live without some things that other people have. You don’t get a new car every year, but you do get a sunset every single night.

Prairie Public
What are your hopes for the lodge?

Cindie
I hope it gets big enough that someone else can make the beds! I guess our medium term goal for the lodge is to be able to rent it some of all times of the year, to have it pay off its debt and its expenses, and then to generate—were we really hoping for about $10,000 income free and clear knowing that it might take us about three years to actually achieve it.

One of our goals is to have families come there and actually use that land like it’s their own, to get a little bit of what we get everyday only without the pressure. They’ll be on vacation, and they’ll get to experience rural life. That’s what the lodge is, it’s rural life.

Prairie Public
What about co-ops?

Kevin
I’ve gone to beef co-op meetings. I don’t know, it just seems like finishing cattle up here is a hard thing to do. It’s cheaper to haul the cattle to the feed than the feed to the cattle, and we need a lot of corn to finish cattle, and there isn’t a lot of corn here. I guess I’m always looking, but I’ve never found anything that I thought would work for us yet.