After the Richfield merger with Atlantic Oil Company was announced in 1965, we bought a step-van so we could move our belongings if we did not like the resulting company. When the company volunteered to move our possessions south, I converted the van to a motor home. While driving through the Flathead Valley in Montana in the fall of 1966, we were shown the timber-covered property where we now live, about a mile southeast of West Glacier. We liked it and made an offer that was accepted. We spent the winter touring the U.S. However, when we passed through the area on our travels that winter, we noted that there was three to four feet of snow on the ground. That is when we started to make plans for an A-frame house that would hold our belongings and become our new home.

On April 1, 1967, we parked our van at the State Highway Department gravel pit a half mile south of U.S. Highway 2 and hiked the one and a half miles on an old logging road to our new property, searching for a suitable building location. We settled on the site we still use today, mostly for its availability to water and “easy access”. We hired a local Hungry Horse, MT contractor to dig the basement and improve the road. He recommended a mason to lay up the concrete blocks and I was the “mud man”.

In May, the house lumber was delivered to the gravel pit. In order to get the 36’ long beams we wanted for the A-frame, we had to have them shipped in from Oregon. A local trucker moved the material from the gravel pit to the building site.

We built A-frames on the block foundation, and then moved them into position using levers, blocks, ropes and pulleys. The first A-frame was one-third the way up when the contractor happened to arrive to get his backhoe. He finished raising that one into position. After guying the first A-frame into position, it was used to lift the others upright. We celebrated Thanksgiving by having electricity and by Christmas we had baseboard heat. A mild winter with little snow allowed us to park the car off the Highway and backpack in supplies as they were needed.

By spring, the house was essentially completed. Following the construction of our home, I designed and built a sawmill from which I sawed lumber from our own logs to build other outbuildings for a shop, and machinery and aircraft storage.

While taking a winter walk in the early 1970s, I noticed that the flat, mostly level benches extending to the northeast and southwest from the house could be linked together by filling in the low drainage between them. The idea for an airstrip was born. I began the slow task of moving earth from the back on the upper side of the dip to the low spot using a one and a half yard front loader. By the time I was finished the toe of the fill was twenty feet deep. Of course, I also had to clear all the lodge pole pine (selling most of the trees for fence posts) from the 2500-foot runway and dig out the stumps. I had acquired a road grader that my mother had used in her road contracting and mining business in California, allowing me to make a smooth finish on the strip.

Meanwhile, in 1974 I started to build my first airplane, a tandem seat Wendt Traveler with an eighty-five horsepower Continental engine. The maiden flight was on October 18, 1977. Butchie was a big help in the plane’s construction and was not a bit hesitant to go up with me. She would say “I know how well built it is because I was there helping.” The required fifty hours of proving flight time was accumulated in 1978. I was back to real flying again, and from my own private airstrip to boot!

I always needed to have a winter project. Next, I bought a wooden wing Mooney, rebuilt it and sold it. Following that, I built a Fisher Classic biplane. A Rotax engine originally powered it. This was only twenty-seven horsepower, not enough at this elevation, so I replaced it with half of a VW engine that put out thirty-five horsepower. I only flew the plane once, just down the runway.

My next project was a Fokker Triplane, like the one flown by the Red Baron in World War One. There were no plans as such for a full-scale aircraft, so I used the model airplane plans from the Cleveland Model Airplane Company and scaled up all the measurements to the full dimensions of the real aircraft. As a child I had built aircraft models from this company’s plans and knew them to be accurate. Once again, I powered the plane with a half of a VW engine. Although I completed the Fokker, it has never flown.

Other winter projects have included building a dump truck, a four-wheel drive golf cart and a water well drilling rig. During the summers I have worked to clean up and burn bug killed pine trees, using the logs to make corduroy passages over swampy ground.

Butchie and I were avid hunters in Alaska and the lower forty-eight. We have several trophy big horn sheep and mountain goat heads displayed in our home. Butchie likes to brag that she got the largest big horn. I still go elk hunting and got a bull nearby last fall (2006).

Ben William Ryan passed away peacefully July 26, 2017 at the Montana Veteran’s Home in Columbia Falls with his loving wife Agnes, “Butchie” and friends at his side.