Red River Camps
"We run the Red River Camps up in Northern Maine, it's a traditional sporting camp. But that kind of means that our craft is sort of twofold threefold, actually, when we throw Gloria into the mix. The first is that we tried to craft the northern Maine experience for people, you know, maybe new people who haven't fly fish before, or new people who haven't even been to Maine before. We had some folks from Long Island the other week, they were great. So we try to kind of bring them in and give them the experience of visiting family in a place that you're just going to fall in love with. We have guests who have been coming here since the 30s. Since they were kids, we have had many guests who have been coming since the 60s. So it's really a place that you come in, you feel like you belong here, you feel like oh, I can be an outdoors person, I can, you know, go hiking and feel okay about that, and not be frightened or anything. So we really try to craft an experience that people are going to want to come back for. On the other side of that for me, is that we tend to say that we're a two-person operation Gloria cooks things, and I fix things. But in the realm of fixing things, I get to be very creative. So you know, parts of my days are spent plumbing parts, and some of my days are spent figuring out how to take an old dryer door and turn it into a window for a new bathroom that we put in. Part of it is marketing, I have to come up with all of our logos, all of our catchphrases, everything for the swag, and things like that. So I really get to be creative every single day in about 15 different ways," said Jen Brophy, one of the owners behind Red River Camps.
Red River Camps is quite the hidden gem as people make their way from across the nation to experience what Jen and Gloria have to offer. From the amazing hospitality to the home-cooked meals, people enjoy coming back to experience more.
"My craft is cooking and spoiling people. I started working at another sporting camp at one time and I watched a cook all the time. I've just taken care of the cabins. I was a cleaning girl and served the tables as Jen does now. But once I started seeing her cook and I kind of wanted to do that. And my mother was a cook for years. So I said okay, I can do this. And if you're cooking for somebody else or in somebody else's kitchen, you kind of feel a little weird, but when you make it your own kitchen, totally different. Then you just go with it. Right and that's kind of what I do. So that's my biggest thing and fly fishing. That's another story. I learned fly fishing from an elderly gentleman and he brought me to tears several times because I couldn't seem to cast -- get the fly to go where he wanted it to which was usually a spring hole and then I'd mess up the spring hole. So finally I got it. I actually got it and I've been doing it ever since I used to practice on the lawn. No fly, just the line. Yeah, so it took a lot of time but I've been doing it since about 1974. So it's a lot of fun and I miss it when I can do it. So I'll go out on this dock and just cast, just cast to say I'm out there fishing and whether I catch anything doesn't matter as long as I'm casting. So it's a lot of fun.," said Gloria, the other owner of Red River Camps and the cook behind their delicious meals.
Kristan's biggest question for Jen was how her family got involved in this property in the first place.
"So my Dad was guiding here from about 1974. Actually, he would guide for bears and deer in the fall time. He and my Mom were recently married. My Mom had one young child at that point, my brother. The owners were looking at selling and going into different ventures. My Dad convinced her that oh, we should run this just for a year while they find a buyer for it. Her big dream was to get to the big city of Bangor and become a real city woman. She's originally from Mars Hill up here and so she said, Okay, I suppose I could cook for people for a summer. Why not? Yeah, the rest is history. She fell in love with it. It was a great thing. I happened to be born that year. So I got to spend my first birthday up here," said Jen.
Red River Camps is all about community and making memories that turn into traditions. Kristan will certainly be coming back for more.
"Your traditional sporting camp in Maine tends to offer two different what we call plans. We all have a big commercial kitchen and a dining room where traditionally guests would come and enjoy breakfast together, talk about fishing over the course of the day, figure out where they want to fish, tell lies about what they caught the day before, things like that. Then we send you out with lunch so you don't have to come back. So you can spend all day on the water all day on the trail. Then we bring everybody together for a family-style dinner. And tradition, we just put a couple of big tables together and everybody from all the different groups will sit together and get to know one another. And as an aside, up in this area, people find that they meet friends, old friends up here without knowing it. We had a couple of groups a few years ago, one group was actually doing their own cooking, and we have a couple of cabins that have their own kitchens. And so one group had been cooking for themselves. One group was eating here with us in the dining room. And they had booked at different times they were from different cities, no connection whatsoever. And the group that was here in the dining room was looking at the dock while the other group was getting ready to go fishing and kind of did a double take and looked at each other and said, does that look like so and so and they turned around I said that is so and so. And turns out that they had grown up across the street from each other. Several times a year we started seeing just serendipity run-ins up here.
Tune in to learn more about Jen's family connection to the camp, Gloria's childhood of growing up around sporting camps and how she got connected to Jen's family, what their day-to-day looks like while tending to their guests and so much more.