A road trip up the Yellowstone River wouldn’t be complete if you didn’t stop in Gardiner at the Cowboy Lodge and Grille for a neat snack.
Due to the closure of the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park because of the road being washed away due to recent flooding, our choices for places to eat were somewhat limited. When we got there, we settled in on the Cowboy Lodge & Grill Restaurant.
If you’re in to the old west and it’s history, then this might very well be the place for you. Antique guns were affixed to the ceilings and real life genuine westerns played on the TV.
It was an abnormally slow day so we were able to seat ourselves.
When our server came around with the menus, both I and the wife ordered up regular cheeseburgers and our son thought to give the Bison burger a go.
I understand tourist towns, and usually wink at some of the prices, but a cup of French something coffee was $4 so I took a hard pass on that. I’m more of a “real” coffee drinker anyway, and besides, I had a couple of Flathead Valley Cherry flavored waters out in the truck that I wouldn’t have any trouble getting back to when I was done eating.
The food came round in about 15 minutes. Each burger had it’s own related little flag on top which I thought was a nice touch. I could imagine someone from Germany holding on to that little flag forever as a memento of their once in a lifetime trip to Montana and Yellowstone National Park.
After we got our food, I was somewhat disappointed at just how hard the burger was to chew .. I eventually ended up snagging up on a fork in order to cut the meat. It reminded me of those times when my wife adds too much bread to her meatloaf. The taste of the cheeseburger was over all underwhelming.
I asked the server if the burgers come in pre-cooked and then microwaved to fill the order. He said the burgers were cooked in the morning in advance of opening and are left to marinate. It was 5PM in the afternoon by the time I had ordered the patty which had been pretty much sitting since the early morning.
Had trouble with the burger, but that won’t prevent me from ever going back, as I’ll just order something different that might have to be made fresh.
Our son loved his Bison burger, said it was easy to chew and tasted great. I don’t think they prep the Bison burgers too early or even at all. I’m guessing that they are made fresh. I’ll have to give it a shot next we’re in.
I wasn’t at all surprised that the service was prompt and friendly because that’s pretty much how we do things here in Montana.
Heads up on the menu though. The online menu is different than the actual menu at the restaurant. The online menu sports some lower prices.
The tourist tax we were charged was 2.7% which is less than what the tourist tax in St. Regis is, and there is a 4.8% service charge on credit/debit cards, so cash is your friend in that case.
The Cowboy Lodge & Grill is located at 208 Stone St in Gardiner
Their phone is +1 406-848-9175
Their website: https://www.cowboyslodge.com/
If you would like to drive down to Gardiner in order to help support them with regard to the loss of tourism dollars this year, then that would be great. Be sure to call The Cowboy Lodge & Grill first to be sure it is still open. Many of the other restaurants and hotels were closed when we were there on account of the road being closed between Gardiner and Mammoth Hot Springs.
Online Menu
The perfect storm of free market economics
A free market economy, market economics, can be a thing to behold when things are running smoothly, but it can also be somewhat of a bear-cat when things aren’t.
I’m pretty sure that most of us would agree that we here in the United States live in a free market economy.
Though we live in a free market economy, I find it rather interesting that there are a lot of people over on the interwebs, including our so-called politicians, that have absolutely no idea of just how a free market economy works.
In an effort to not putting too fine of a point on this, I’d have to say that the oil companies, at this time, were all dressed up with no place to go.
Oil producers were faced with a glut of crude oil that left them scrambling to find space to store the oversupply. Brent crude oil prices also tumbled, closing at $9.12 a barrel on April 21, a far cry from the $70 a barrel that crude oil fetched at the beginning of the year.
The plunge of U.S. oil futures into negative territory was short-lived. But the collapse in demand was so fast and volatile that it led many people to question whether oil would be able to fully recover in 2021. By the summer of 2020, oil prices began to rebound as nations came out of the Covid lock-downs and OPEC agreed to major cuts in crude oil production. West Texas Intermediate crude finished 2020 at a price of $49 per barrel, while Brent crude finished the year at a price of $51 per barrel.
People claim that Trump was responsible for keeping the price at the pump so low (2019-2020), but really, the low prices were the result of the Saudi’s and the Russian’s having their little pissey-fits over just how much to either increase or decrease production. During their little squabbles, oil tanked totally (this is the point where you would’ve had to give me $37 for every barrel of oil I wanted)
Currently, the U.S. has 129 refineries in operation. Though we might be able to get our hands on vast amounts of oil, the ability to refine it and get it to market is limited, affecting the actual supply that is available for consumption. Purchasing oil from the Saudi’s won’t make much of a difference in lowering the price of gas at the pump, even at $120 a barrel, because our refining capacity is stretched pretty thin already. Even if we pumped our oil at home, the prices would remain inflated due to the same limits on our refining capacity as it relates to the current demand.
Jumping up and down blaming Trump or Biden for all of this is just political bullshit. Trump and Biden, at the end of the day, were just as tied to our free market economy as we are. Neither of them either in past or present capacity could do a single thing. Trying to supposedly help, either via Presidential or Congressional fiat, would only serve to muck up the natural order of our free market economy and continue the current pain for much, much longer. Besides, trying to fix all of this using socialist principles wouldn’t be too unlike putting transmission fluid into your crank case.
Demand for fuel is at an all time high, production is limited, so here goes the price through the proverbial roof. Our capacity to refine is at it’s limit. Yes boys and girls, oil production/refining is actually up. Refining rates currently are higher than when Trump was in office.
Because of the Russian/Ukraine war, the U.S. has stopped purchasing imported oil from Russia.(The U.S. had only imported about 12% of it’s domestic supply from Russia)
With keeping free market economy in mind here, I’ll now introduce you to the Federal Reserve.
To add insult to injury to what’s already going on in the oil industry, the U.S. Fed just happened to decide that it needed to print literally trillions of dollars out of thin air and it flooded the domestic economy with it.
Here we have the perfect storm of market economics paired with increased inflation.
The last time oil was up to $120 per barrel, gas prices rose to $3.80-$4.00 per gallon. This time it’s the same, but with inflation factored in. The price at the pump now, with added inflation, is $5.00-$6.00 per gallon. As demand increases as most surely it will, and with our current rising rate of inflation, the price at the pump could quite literally go much higher.
Since we all live in a free market economy, we might do well to just STFU and roll with it.
If for some reason $7-$8 gas per gallon is untenable for you and your pocket book, you might consider actually electing people to office that know a thing or two about the free market economy. The very least we can do is to not be drawn in by all of the political bullshit from either side and look at all of this for what it really is.
Are the prices going up? Of course they are.
The best we can do in the short term is to hunker down and roll with it.
Chart sourced from: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS2&f=M