A Steamboat Legend - Remembering Elaine Gay

In the winter of 2016 our community lost a local treasure in the passing of Elaine Gay. She saw an amazing amount of change in her 98 years in the Yampa Valley and will be greatly missed.  She was also the grandmother of two of my Extension colleagues, Todd Hagenbuch, county Extension director and agriculture agent for Routt County and Joy Akey, family and consumer science Extension agent for Yuma County. If you collect wild sarvisberries in the spring, you might enjoy Elaine's famous Sarvisberry Cobbler.

An interview with Elaine Gay

In 2015, Todd and I sat down with Elaine at Casey's Pond senior living facility and asked her about life in Yampa Valley.  The video below is a portion of that conversation.

Elaine Gay lives across the river from the Pleasant Valley Ranch her husband's Swiss parents homesteaded in 1898.  Bob Gay (1915-1994) died working the land that was his life, a folk hero continuing to feed with sled and team, opposing the development of Lake Catamount and radiating laughter and generosity.  The sign on their porch door reflects that spirit: "Hurry back.  May you always ride a good horse and eat good beef."

Elaine, who attended (local county) schools at Sidney and Mesa, shares her memories of 52-years of marriage and life on the Green Creek Ranch in "Cowpokes, Cowpies & Otherwise: Recipes of the Old West," a 1990 cookbook, and "How Pleasant is the Valley," a history of the area she published in 1996.

The cookbook is a smiling account of the foibles of hired men who have helped on the 2,000-acre spread.  She says she never met one who wasn't hungry.  Elaine is amused by romantic stories about cooking on coal stoves before electricity, and literary comparisons of stressed, modern mothers to their supposedly carefree, rocking-chair-bound grandmothers.

Excerpt about Elaine from Faster Horses, Younger Women, Older Whiskey by Sureva Towler and Jim Stanko