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Tasty Theatrics of the Wine Cellar

By Bernie Hunhoff

The Wine Cellar is in the heart of Rapid City, near Art Alley, the Alex Johnson Hotel and Prairie Edge Trading Company.

Christy Land waited on her first table when she was 13 years old and living with her family in the small town of Philip, 85 miles northeast of Rapid City.

“Just slinging eggs and coffee for cowboys and ranchers,” she says.”I wasn’t even legal age for work, and I loved it. I saw it as such a great way to meet people.”

She soon found that knowing one’s way around a restaurant is economic security.”It’s what put me through college at Montana State, and it allowed me to travel across the country,” she says. It also brought her home.

Land was living in California at age 30 when she returned to Rapid City for a family wedding and realized,”that I was supposed to be here. I was never lonelier than when I was surrounded by 20 million people in the valley.”

Family, friends and West River’s outdoor landscapes had been calling.”I was planning to be here two weeks, but I never went back to California,” she says. She quickly found work at some of Rapid City’s top dining establishments, including Arrowhead Country Club and Botticelli’s.

In 2006 she began to serve diners at the Wine Cellar, a cozy restaurant on Sixth Street, midway between two downtown Rapid City icons, the Alex Johnson Hotel and Prairie Edge. Curt Pochardt started the Wine Cellar in 1998, along with an adjacent wine store. Customers could buy wine at Once Upon a Vine and bring the bottle next door to enjoy with their lunch and dinner. Pochardt sold the eatery to Pamela Light and Tammy Sellars in 2001.

“I was working here when my mom passed away,” Land says.”I didn’t know what to do and then one day Pamela suggested that I should buy the Wine Cellar. At first, I thought ‘no thank you,’ but my stepdad told me we should do this. He said it’ll be fun. We can work together.”

Her stepdad is Dave Hirning, a longtime Black Hills contractor.”I think it was perhaps his way of making sure I had a career and wasn’t just galavanting around the country,” she laughs.

Christy Land credits her stepfather Dave Hirning for the restaurant’s success. “I want people to know that I couldn’t do it without him there by my side every day,” she says.

She told Hirning,”Okay, let’s do this. But you have to be there every day with me.” Though he continues to work in construction, he has kept his promise: he does everything from playing host to cooking and washing dishes.”He especially watches to be sure the recipes are followed,” Land says.”I couldn’t do this without him.”

The result is Rapid City restaurant history. Hirning and Land have not only kept the Wine Cellar open but cemented it as a downtown destination. Entrepreneurs celebrate successes there over the filet mignon or the fabled mushroom lasagna. Families meet for birthday parties. Lovers linger in alcoves called”The Alley,” a romantic hideaway behind the main dining area.

The Wine Cellar has also become a go-to place for community fundraisers, including Cinco de Meow, held every May to raise money for the West River Spay and Neuter Coalition which seeks to prevent an over-population of dogs and cats by assisting low-income pet owners.

The cozy establishment has only about a dozen small tables, all with black tablecloths and candles. Blond oak floorboards, shiny with the charming blemishes of old wood, also add warmth to the interior. Midway between the dining area and a small kitchen is the aforementioned alley because long ago it was an actual alley between two old buildings that are now connected.

“It’s all so much fun,” Land says.”I love it. Dave loves it. I really love people and I love to create a place for them to come and enjoy.”

Watch Land, who is 50, and her small staff — all dressed in black — in action on a busy Saturday night and you soon recognize that they are not only serving food; there is a unique entertainment vibe in the air that one can almost taste.

Land says it’s as intentional as the sauce on the lasagna. She studied photography, media and theater at Montana State, and she readily acknowledges that her style of restauranting involves performance.
“You have to set aside everything going on in your own personal life,” she explains.”You are there for your guests. You need to know what you are doing, in the kitchen and in the dining room. You have to be able to read your audience and it has to be genuine. I really love people so it’s natural for me.”

She says the challenge, in these days of low unemployment, is to recruit and keep good staff.”I’d rather be short-staffed than have people who aren’t here for the right reason,” she says.”You can teach anybody how to wait on a table, but you can’t teach them to really care.”

Other issues have arisen that have been the demise of many independent eateries. For example, the costs and availability of food from corporate suppliers is so daunting that Land and her team now make nearly everything from scratch.”Even before the supply chain issues, we always tried to use local foods, much in the same concept as European cuisine served in the small restaurants there,” she says.”So much of what you might buy is full of preservatives and chemicals, so it’s just easier and healthier to make it yourself. Staying small gives us more control over quality and consistency.”

She buys honeycomb from a Colorado woman who has been raising bees for 70 years.”We get wonderful chicken from a farm in Nebraska. A family from Caputa provides fresh vegetables and our mushrooms come from Alan Carner’s Black Hills Mushrooms.” Bison meat is raised near the Badlands on author Dan O’Brien’s Wild Idea Ranch. She is a regular shopper at the Black Hills Farmers Market.

Just as the food represents the region, in a less tangible way the Wine Cellar is also a reflection of all the restaurants where Land worked.”I learned a lot about wines from Luigi Tuorletti, who ran Botticelli’s,” she says.”After our shift was over, he would sometimes have us try wines — really fine wines that I wouldn’t normally have been familiar with. I got to talk to Luigi the other day and I thanked him for all his mentoring.”

Land’s childhood friends from Philip sometimes step through the door, along with people she served at Arrowhead and other establishments.

“I love that about the Wine Cellar, the way it brings all these people together in a fun way,” she says.

Diners say the same.”Just the service. The food. The people.” That’s how veterinarian Lynn Steadman explains why he’ll drive 90 miles from Chadron, Nebraska.”It is sort of a European-California fusion,” he says.”It’s a different vibe. It’s a limited menu but everything is made fresh. The cuisine doesn’t follow any one path but it’s just good and it’s different.”

Diners will find only about a dozen tables inside the cozy Wine Cellar, all draped with black cloths and featuring a candle.

Steadman says the Wine Cellar garners attention far and wide.”The thing that amazes me is that you can mention this place and, though it’s a small place, everyone knows about it. You’ll go somewhere and be talking to a diverse group of people, and if you start talking about restaurants someone will soon recommend the Wine Cellar. It has a very devoted following.”

He credits Christy Land.”She makes it look easy, but she takes great pride in what she does,” he says.”I’ve observed that she is very concerned that each diner who comes in the door has a good experience.”

James Humen was dining just two tables away from the Nebraska veterinarian. He and his wife brought their two young children on a Saturday evening. The kids were sharing the filet mignon and wondering if they had room for chocolate cake.

Humen appreciates the atmosphere and the food.”This is one of the only chef-driven restaurants in Rapid City. I like the idea that he is in the back in the kitchen, just creating and seeing what he can do for the customers.”

Oh, yes, the food. A writer could wax on about the Wine Cellar for hundreds of words and not get around to the main attractions — the Wild Idea buffalo sliders with roasted tomato jam, carmelized onions and mushrooms; the pan-seared sea scallops on a small bed of risotto, topped with strawberries and basil; or the house filet mignon, Angus beef chargrilled with the house steak rub and mushroom demi-glace.

There’s a story behind every menu item. The risotto, made of arboreo rice, has no cream and is gluten free; it tastes so good that some might consider it a main course. The mushroom lasagna, a vegetarian feature, is richly layered with spinach, tomato, cheeses and a red sauce made — like most everything — right there in the restaurant, in a space not much bigger than a typical residential kitchen.

Curt Pochardt, who founded the diner in 1998, says it more than meets the vision he had at the outset.”They are truly cooking and creating fine foods,” he says.”Nothing comes frozen off a truck. Christy and her group have a level of expertise beyond anything we could do, and beyond what most anybody is doing today.”

He’s a fan of the Cellar’s thin crust pizzas, which include the wild boar sausage, roasted vegetable, Italian fromage, pesto and a traditional pepperoni.”Twenty-five years ago, we thought it was a good thing for our town,” Pochardt says.”I think it is even more important today to have places like the Wine Cellar. The fact that Christy and her stepdad are willing and eager to keep it going strong is something that a lot of people obviously appreciate.”

Those people are easy to meet. They are gathered, five nights a week, around the black-clothed tables on Sixth Street.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Pretty and Practical

By John Andrews

Hats were practical on the ranch near Newell where Dusty Kirk grew up. A real old school cowboy might even use it to water his horse. The hats that come from Dusty’s Sturgis studio are handmade to suit your lifestyle, but sometimes customers commission one simply to decorate their home or office.

Dusty’s Originals has become known for hats that combine function, fashion and art. It’s a lifelong dream for Dusty, who worked in the medical and fashion industries before returning to South Dakota 12 years ago to care for her aging parents. A love of hats — especially top hats — led Dusty to her current career.”I used to do one-of-a-kind hats for runway shows, and then a friend who worked with Ralph Lauren encouraged me to learn how to make all kinds of hats,” Kirk says.”When I first started doing top hats, I was buying the bases and reworking them, and I didn’t want to depend on anyone else for that, so I learned how to start making them.”

Dusty’s hats are made from a fur felt combination or pure fur — usually beaver, mink or chinchilla — and accentuated with beadwork, custom dye bands or other flourishes. Though her background is West River and she’s developed a hat line called Black Hills 605 to honor the region’s culture, she can create any style.”I had a gentleman from Texas send me photos of two of his favorite hats and told me to mash them together into one,” she says.”I love to chat with my customers and get a feel for what they’re looking for. A lot of people don’t tell me exactly how they want things. They might tell me how they want the crown or the brim, but then they just let me go.”

Dusty’s hats are available at Jewel of the West in Hill City and Just for Looks in Sturgis. Fittings are by appointment at her home studio or online.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Spink’s Cheese Makers

By Bernie Hunhoff

When milk prices soured in 2018, members of the Spink Hutterite Colony considered selling their dairy cows. Then someone offered a better idea. Why not start a cheese factory?

Now their Kasemeister cheeses (pronounced Kay-sah-meister) are sold in 140 stores throughout the Dakotas and Minnesota, and the colony’s cows are as happy as ever.

“The most popular sellers are cheddar, gouda, baby Swiss and Colby,” says Jeremy Wipf, who manages the cheese factory with help from four full-timers and a dozen part-timers. They work in a gleaming, state-of-the-art stainless-steel plant designed with the help of consultants. However, cheese-making is not entirely new to the Hutterite families; for generations, they’ve made pane cheese, using recipes that date back to their European roots.

Though most of the cheeses are sold in stores, the colony also established a small gift shop in the front of the factory. The shelves and coolers feature jams, honey, pickles, canned goods, chicken pot pies and all the cheese varieties. The shopkeepers sell a few cold beverages and offer free samples of the cheeses, including a rich and crumbly white cheddar”Special Reserve” that is aged for four years.

The cheese factory is located just east of the colony farm, across a field from the happy cows, at 39685 182nd Street. It is about 30 miles northwest of Huron, or 9 miles south of Frankfort.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Let’s Go Shopping in Scotland

By Bernie Hunhoff

Dean and Karen Rettedal’s department store in Scotland features apparel for men, women and children, though Dean says women’s clothing is most popular. “The men will wear something three or four years or until it wears out, but fortunately the women want something new now and then.”

Ludwig and Donna Rettedal arrived in Scotland to run a shoe store in 1959. Within three years, Walmart, Kmart, and Shopko pioneered big-box stores and suddenly it seemed that small town retailers were an endangered species.

Nobody told the Rettedals.

“I was in the fourth grade when we moved here from Winner,” Dean Rettedal says.”It was in the spring of the year and all the Scotland boys went out after school and played baseball.” Before long, he was playing first base.

Dean’s dad was an avid golfer in Winner.”There was no course here in Scotland, so he and some friends went around and sold shares and started the golf course.”

Dean and his four brothers fished for bullhead and bluegill in Lake Henry. He mowed lawns for spending money and was inspired to play the trumpet by music teacher Len Vellek. The latter was life changing.

Dean majored in music at the University of South Dakota. When he needed an accompanist for his junior-year solo trumpet recital, someone suggested Karen Twite, a Beresford freshman. They married in 1971 and both taught at Centerville and Emmettsburg, Iowa, but Dean didn’t forget his happy childhood in Scotland.

In 1979, he and Karen bought the department store where his father had the shoe store. Incidentally, 1979 is also when Texas Instruments debuted a personal computer that would soon make it possible for people to shop from home. Amazon took advantage of the technology in 1994 and before long many of the big box stores were slumping.

Ludwig and Donna Rettedal came to Scotland with their young family in 1959 to run a shoe store in the town’s department store.

Only two JCPenney stores survive in all of South Dakota and there are now just three Kmart stores in the entire United States. Amazon is the world’s biggest retailer worldwide. But Rettedal’s Department Store is king in Scotland. It continues to exist as 4,000 square feet of calm and charm, aisles of gentility that seem very different from today’s often overhyped, overpriced and underwhelming commercial shopping experience.

Dean and Karen Rettedal only shrug and smile when asked about the contrast with the corporate culture.”We do have people who come in and say it’s nice to have somewhere to shop other than a big mall,” Dean acknowledges.

“We have a lot of loyal customers who have also become good friends,” nods Karen.

Understatements, if you ask around town. Mike Behl has a good view of the Rettedal Store. He works across the street at Farmers and Merchants State Bank, his family’s vocation since his grandfather came to town in 1938.

“Dean and Karen have a market that fits the people of Scotland,” Behl says.”And people come from all over the area. You see cars from everywhere. You can see that people like them, and they just like to shop there.”

The young banker says it is a godsend for the men, especially.”If you find you have to go to a funeral or a wedding and you need a nice shirt, you go see Dean.”

Rettedal’s has clothing for men, women and children, along with toys and books, greeting cards and a shoe department that looks exactly like it did when the family came to town in 1959. The same six steel chairs still await customers, though Dean reupholstered them a few years ago.

Behl, the banker, says having a beloved cornerstone store helps the entire town. He points up and down the street to a flower shop, coffee shop, hardware store, grocery store, four-lane bowling alley and several eateries that all benefit when out-of-towners arrive.

The neighboring stores also have their charms and niches. Jake and Valerie Sturges stock the usual tools, paints and plumbing supplies that you expect at Scotland Hardware, but they also offer Valerie’s handcrafted gift items and a big section of fishing tackle for anglers at Lake Henry.

“We also have a lot of the small appliances like coffee pots,” says Valerie.”It’s an emergency in town if someone’s coffee pot goes out first thing in the morning.”

Ron’s Market, just a block off Main Street, stocks the basic food items, along with local treats like Amish candies, Dimock Cheese, chislic from Kaylor Locker and eggs from a local Hutterite colony.

Scotland Locker, the town’s popular butcher shop, is best-known for flavored brats. Favorites include a breakfast brat stuffed with hash browns and cheddar cheese, as well as a hot brat known as Napalm in the AM.

Dean Rettedal says Scotland had more stores in the 1960s when he was a child.”We had three cafes, two hardware stores, two grocery stores. Fortunately, we still have all those services, but they are just not doubled up today.”

In the town’s early years, it even had two main streets. The town was founded in 1870 on Dawson Creek by C.T. Campbell, a Civil War soldier from Pennsylvania who nearly died from battle injuries. Though badly crippled, he recovered enough to return to the fighting and served with distinction. Reassigned to Dakota Territory after the war, he was drawn to the beauty of Dawson Creek and chose it as his townsite.

When the Menno Wolves and Scotland Highlanders merged their football programs, their gridiron name became the Trappers. Dean Rettedal shows off the mascot, a highlander with a wolf head hat.

Campbell helped Scotlanders relocate to the present site in 1881 when the railroad arrived. In its early years, the town had two shopping districts because of language barriers between Germans from Russia and other settlers. The former group built stores along Currie Street (now Curry Street), which still intersects Main Street on the west side of town. However, as immigrant families became more acclimated to the English language and American culture, Main Street dominated. Today it still features pioneer brick architecture, though some of the handsome structures need repair.

Fortunately, the Rettedal Department Store looks much as it did in 1929 when JCPenney leased the space. Dean has a deed for the property that shows the terms: $1,500 per year plus 2 percent of gross sales over $90,000.

The store still has the same high tin ceiling and big wood door. Greeting card racks are where they were in the 1950s but gone is the mechanical cash carrier that carried customers’ payments and receipts to an upstairs office.

When the Rettedals bought the store in 1979, Karen ran it full-time while Dean split his days between the store and a part-time role as a music teacher and band director at Mount Marty University in Yankton.

“When I retired from Mount Marty in 2015, friends asked me what I was going to do with all my time,” laughs Dean.”I said I was going to just work six days a week.”

On summer mornings, he rises early and visits the golf course his father helped to start.”I go out for about 20 minutes and walk as fast as I can go,” he grins. Then he heads for the store.

He serves as treasurer for the Scotland Chamber of Commerce, a job he’s held for 40 years. Karen directs the church choir and Dean still plays trumpet for the Yankton Summer Band and the Sioux Empire Brass. They visit their children, Kristi and David, who live in Sioux Falls and Dakota Dunes, respectively. They also travel”to market” at Minneapolis several times a year to shop for inventory. But most of their days are spent together in their store aisles, along with Vickie Fillaus and Marlys Haase, two longtime co-workers.

Dean, a man of few words, describes a good day at the store like this:”You’re busy. People are happy. You have what they want.”

He doesn’t need to say that working alongside Karen, in the same space that attracted his parents to Scotland in 1959, is something he cherishes. It’s apparent to every visitor who walks through the old wood door.

“We are retirement age I guess, but it’s a great life for us,” Karen says.”It’s a big commitment so you have to enjoy it, but we do. I don’t know what we’d do all day if we didn’t have the store. If someone came in and said, ëWe want to buy it,’ I guess we’d have to think about it a little harder Ö.”

Obviously, Karen has no enthusiasm for selling. She didn’t even finish the sentence, and Dean acted as if he wasn’t listening to such talk. That’s good news for Scotland’s remaining Main Street.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Living Drink

By John Andrews

Jacob Fokken was 20 and drinking maybe one or two sodas every day. Soon, he began feeling that something wasn’t quite right with his health, so he decided to eliminate those sugary drinks.”I quit cold turkey, which isn’t how a lot of things go,” he says.”I substituted with tea, black coffee and at the same time I found kombucha. The nature of the kombucha satisfied everything that I ever craved in a soda, plus it was low in sugar and had probiotics.”

That life change eventually turned into a family business called Songbird Kombucha, though it took some time to get there. Fokken drank kombucha for about six years before he tried making it. Kombucha is an ancient food that dates back more than 2,000 years. It’s a fermented drink made with tea, sugar, bacteria and yeast, and then infused with different flavors. Kombucha’s probiotic benefits include promoting a healthy immune system and relieving stomach and intestinal ailments.

Fokken found himself working at the Sioux Falls Food Coop, where he revived its dormant kombucha line.”I just dove in and experimented for a year and really enjoyed it,” he says.”Plus, I was able to serve it to people at the register. People were trying it, and I had this growing confidence in brewing it. It just grew and grew.”

In February 2020, Fokken and his wife Elsa launched Songbird Kombucha. Their rotation of about 20 flavors features a variety of fruit and herb combinations, such as blueberry lavender, orange licorice anise and rhubarb cinnamon. Find Songbird Kombucha on tap in Sioux Falls, Vermillion, Yankton, Hartford, Jefferson and Mitchell or visit the Fokkens’ storefront at 1712 S. Minnesota Avenue in Sioux Falls.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Ultimate Vehicle

By John Andrews

Kent Miller’s Ultimate Outdoor Vehicle was built for ice fishing, but serves a multitude of purposes.

A lot of good inventions get their start when someone says,”Wouldn’t it be nice if….” That’s what happened nearly four years ago when Kent Miller went ice fishing with some family members. They pulled sleds loaded with gear across the snow, traversed the ice to set up a shack, then tore it down and moved when the fish wouldn’t bite — all of which was made more difficult by his father-in-law’s bad knee. That led to Miller’s,”Wouldn’t it be nice if …” moment.

The mechanical engineer envisioned a vehicle on tracks that could go through snow, could float in case the ice broke, and had space for everything a fisherman might need. Three years of building and testing prototypes finally resulted in the Ultimate Outdoor Vehicle.

Though Miller had ice fishing in mind during development, the UOV is designed to do almost anything in any conditions. The hull is made from marine grade 1/8-inch aluminum for durability. Its heavy-duty rubber tracks with steel links carry it through snow, mud, grass, water and gravel. The hydrostatic drive and zero-turn ability make it maneuverable and easy to control. A canvas enclosure and vinyl windshield and side windows protect the driver and passenger from the elements. Inside are hatches that lock and seal, allowing fishermen to drill holes in the ice without ever leaving the vehicle.

Miller has a degree in mechanical engineering from South Dakota State University and has worked in the field for 20 years. He and his wife, Heather Solberg, also operate Miller Design and Manufacturing from their acreage between Brookings and Volga. That’s where the UOV was born, along with other tracked projects such as a radio-controlled vehicle for a friend who has physical disabilities and a small snow dozer.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Fun and Games

By John Andrews

Dustin and Hezel Garness build larger-than-life games in their Hartford workshop.

It all began with Kubb, a game that legend says originated with the Vikings, who played with the bones of their conquered enemies. (It likely is Scandinavian, but less macabre; Kubb translates to”block of wood” in Norwegian, and probably evolved from a game using scraps of firewood.) Dustin Garness’s family likes to play it, and one day the woodworker in him wondered if he could make a set. After he crafted the pieces, he wondered if anyone would buy it. He made a few more Kubb sets, some giant dice and tumbling blocks and brought them to Hartford’s Downtown Market. He sold four games.”That was a good start,” Garness says.”It was sort of a mini proof of concept.”

Garness Games is now a legitimate side hustle for Garness and his wife, Hezel. Dustin works at Family Memorials by Gibson in Sioux Falls and Hezel is a preschool teacher just finishing her education degree, but in the evenings and on weekends they make larger than life yard games: dominoes made from 1 by 6 cedar, dice from 4-by-4 lumber, stackable blocks out of 2-by-3s, huge Connect Four racks and cornhole boards.

Customers have come to appreciate the creativity they can add to their own games. Garness will customize them with names and dates for weddings or other family functions, for example. The Garnesses have also launched a rental service and will transport games for events.

They’ve also launched a series of educational products for students learning their numbers and letters and have new games in mind.”There’s always a list,” Garness says, which currently includes”The Price is Right” favorite Plinko.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Riding on Air

By John Andrews

Jesse Jurrens leads Legend Suspensions, a Sturgis business specializing in smooth rides.

You could say that Legend Suspensions got its start on the dirt bike trails of Codington County. Jesse Jurrens grew up outside of Watertown, riding and modifying bikes. He continued tinkering after he got his first Harley, but when it came to the suspension system, he looked far and wide for an air spring system similar to what was being used on hot rods.”When I couldn’t find it, I decided to make my own,” Jurrens says.”That sent me down the path of fabricating prototypes, thinking in the back of my mind that maybe there was a market for it.”

The ultimate result was an air suspension system that has become the bedrock product for Legend Suspensions. Made using state-of-the-art rubber, the system provides a smoother ride, increased load capacity and adjustability mid-ride. The systems are now in use around the world, but it took a lot of time, testing and patience.

Jurrens began in the basement of his parents’ house in Watertown in the mid-1990s. He soon met Dan Dolan, now a professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, who specialized in vehicle dynamics.”I wasn’t a student but he was intrigued by what I was trying to accomplish,” Jurrens says.”He helped me to emulate a million miles of testing on that first product, which took quite a bit of time, but it was important to build that safety if I thought I was going to sell these in the future.”

The key came when the Gates Rubber Company agreed to share its Aramid fiber rubber air spring technology.”Aramid fiber is almost like a bulletproof vest,” he says.”When we run a lot of air pressure into these air springs, they can only grow about a millimeter at most, because it’s such a tight compact area underneath these bikes. The rubber has to stay its size and be able to handle extreme use. This is the only material that holds up. It makes our product work.”

Legend Suspensions now employs around 35 people at its headquarters in Sturgis. Parts are machined at a plant in Watertown and other components come from smaller companies in South Dakota and around the Midwest. In addition to air suspensions, they also produce high-end coil and front-end suspensions.”No matter what the customer is looking to do with that motorcycle, we’ve got an option,” Jurrens says.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Changing the Game

By John Andrews

Erika Peterson turned a decadent treat into a multi-million-dollar enterprise.

When Erika Peterson and her partner Craig Mount moved back to Rapid City from Colorado, they missed the homemade peanut butter that they had discovered at farmers markets and grown to love. So, Peterson bought a refurbished commercial peanut grinder and made small batches for family and friends. Demand grew through social media, word of mouth and the understated power of peanut butter. Nearly two years later, she leads a company called Nerdy Nuts and sells up to $500,000 worth of peanut butter a month.”I had no clue how obsessed people were with peanut butter until I started selling it,” Peterson says.”Our flavors sell out every week; people are asking us for merchandise. We just can’t wrap our heads around it.”

The business’ rise began at the Black Hills Farmers Market. Peterson would sell out of peanut butter within two hours. It continued as they branched out to other marketplaces and trade shows.”We started asking our customers what they were looking for, and how they were eating our peanut butter. And everybody kept saying that they’d just eat it with a spoon, because it was so different and good.” That difference comes in the texture. Peterson calls it”smunchy,” somewhere between smooth and crunchy, featuring tiny chunks of peanuts in a smooth base.

After the couple had their second child, Peterson — a graduate of the University of South Dakota’s School of Business — went all-in on peanut butter. She created a presidential peanut butter line, naming flavors after contenders in the 2020 general election. National television networks noticed, giving them their first taste of viral stardom.”That’s when we realized that people were looking at peanut butter as an actual food item, a treat, something they could indulge in.”

That led to an indulgence line featuring peanut butters with chocolate, brownie bits and other decadent delights. When three influencers on the social media platform TikTok all posted rave reviews, sales skyrocketed. Peterson rented a commercial kitchen, hired a packing company, found a facility to make plastic jars and hired logistics experts to help it all run smoothly.”We went from a tiny company doing $30,000 in sales in 2019 to a multimillion-dollar company in six months,” she says.”We’re changing the game of peanut butter.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Badlands Ranch

By Bernie Hunhoff

As Badlands B&B pioneers, Phil and Amy Kruse occasionally speak at entrepreneurship conferences. They recently visited Lemmon, where they posed by a mural near John Lopez’s Kokomo Gallery.

Badlands ranching was never easy. Rain is always scarce and the soil seems better suited to prickly pear cactus than anything a sheep or cow might enjoy. Still, there’s a peaceful beauty to the landscapes — which sometimes look like the moon with some grass, a rare tree and a dirt road added — so the Kruse family has been finding ways to stay put for 101 years.

Phil Kruse was born there in 1963. He studied electrical engineering at LeTourneau University in Texas, but soon after graduating he came home to the ranch.”I knew I’d have to supplement the income,” he says, noting that the rugged land requires about 50 acres of forage for every cow.”Just in my lifetime we’ve lost about half of the farmers in our area.”

Even as a teenager, Phil recognized that there might be potential in the 1 million travelers who pass within a few miles of the Kruse ranch every summer.”I always had a dream of maybe doing a bed and breakfast,” he says.

With the help of his father and brothers, he started to build a concrete guest house in 1996.”I hooked the cement mixer to the tractor and bought 200 bags at a time from the South Dakota Cement Plant in Rapid City,” he says.

When he ran short of money, he tried to get a loan for more cement.”The banker said he couldn’t loan me anything until it was finished,” he remembers,”and I couldn’t finish it without the loan.” Fortunately his dad scraped together $20,000 and work proceeded on the eight-room lodge now known as the Circle View Ranch, just a few miles west of Interior along Highway 44.

He welcomed his first guests in 2000.”Right away, we got a lot of foreigners because they knew what a B&B was. We could see that people appreciated our authenticity.”

Bookings were slow in the early years. That began to change in 2003 when Amy Kom, an Arizona State University student from Idaho, arrived to do a summer internship at the national park. She met Phil at a branding; they were engaged by July and married by October.

Though she was new to the region, Amy shared Phil’s love of the Badlands and his vision to create a lodge for travelers. She brought a feminine touch to the business, plus some restaurant experience and her new degree in recreation management. As the years passed, she also delivered three children who have grown up making coffee, doing laundry and showing city people how to feed the chickens that are scratching in the yard.

A carrol-loving donkey called Jack is sometimes part of the welcoming committee at the Circle View, along with the Kruses’ children, Russell, Jacob and Katie.

Amy says the guests are looking for a rural experience or they wouldn’t be there, but she and Phil don’t put on a show.”We just live our lives. There might be a rattlesnake on the back deck (though that would be rare) and the baby might be crying but that’s just how we live.”

The Kruses’ children — Katie, 11, Jacob, 10, and Russell, 9 — welcome tag-alongs as they feed an orphan calf or collect eggs. The children also help to serve a full ranch breakfast to the guests, who may number 30 to 40 on a summer morning.

The complimentary breakfast is a favorite for the travelers, who have often grown weary of restaurant fare, and Amy says cooking for three dozen”isn’t such a big deal when you do it every day. We have a system.”

The breakfast routine actually begins with that Badlands soil.”We harvest our own wheat that we grow at the ranch,” Amy says.”We grind wheat every couple of weeks and I make a flour for our own whole wheat and berry pancakes.” The children pick fresh eggs from the hen house, and honey is also produced on the ranch. The rest of the menu varies from day to day, but always with enough variety to suit all palates.

After breakfast, most guests head for the park but oftentimes they are reluctant to leave the ranch. Some go on rock hunting or prairie dog hunting expeditions, while others are content feeding carrots to the donkey or petting Cowboy Kitty, a 15-year-old black cat.

“People also like to watch the fall roundup, spring branding and vaccinating — whatever we might be doing,” Phil says.”People are interested in rural America. But we don’t really entertain people. We don’t have the time.”

Phil’s brother, Daniel, and Daniel’s daughter, Casie, offer horseback tours and the Kruses have welcomed weddings, retreats, class reunions and other big gatherings.

Circle View also has an accommodation for more solitary travelers — honeymooners, perhaps, or a reclusive poet: it’s a homesteader’s cabin that is cleaner but no more civilized than it was in 1880 when built by the Hamm family.

There’s no plumbing or electricity, although there is a wood outhouse and a fire pit outside. Guests bring their own bedding, water and supplies. The cabin, which lies close to the White River, ranks as one of South Dakota’s most primitive lodging rentals. A New York Times travel writer described it as an opportunity to”live the hardscrabble life of a claimer for a night or two.” The Kruses also have two other cabins with all the usual amenities, along with the eight-room lodge.

They were already busy 10 years ago when AirBnB began to change the bed and breakfast industry. Today the website accounts for a considerable share of their bookings, and they stay busy throughout the summer, but they still find time to enjoy the Badlands.

“We like to hike the park,” says Amy.”The kids especially like Notch Trail, where there’s a really thrilling ladder that you have to climb to reach an amazing view. We also like to go fishing in the dam, motorcycling or kayaking in the White River.”

The uncertainty of weather and cattle prices have taken a toll on Badlands farmers and ranchers through the years but the Kruses”make hay” from a neighborly culture that has survived good times and bad.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.