SpiritWorks Trilogy

In December 2011, Lindy Dewey bought ten acres of undeveloped land in the Flathead Valley. The property had been home to a laser tag business, and it needed clearing. She spent the first two years in reclusive retreat, doing that slow physical work and, as she tells it, treating the land as a canvas and the plants as paints.

The turn came in the fall of 2013, while she was harvesting. She heard what felt like the land telling her she had been healed here and that it was now her turn to let it heal others. Around then her middle son, finishing his naturopathic physician program, told her that good medicinal herbs were hard for practitioners to find, and he recommended forty to begin with. In January 2014 she cleared trees for the main cultivation area. By summer the farm was laid out, and the first five interns arrived.

The farm carries a history of USDA certified organic status with the Montana Department of Agriculture. It now describes itself as a permaculture herbal sanctuary, with over 100 medicinal plants grown by regenerative methods. The site gives the work a phrase: growing more than plants, growing people.

The retreat center is physically separate from the other accommodations and is booked for exclusive group use. It has nine rooms sleeping up to seventeen, a gathering room, workshop space, a full kitchen and a fire pit, with a three-night minimum. Retreat center guests also have the Hydrotherapy Oasis: a wood-fired sauna, a cold plunge and a wood-fired jetted hot tub that needs about five hours of heating and a day's notice. Solo and longer stays are the Studio Sanctuary, the two-bedroom Long View Residence, the minimal Hermitage, and tent sites with a lean-to. Dewey, a craniosacral and polarity practitioner of more than three decades, can arrange polarity sessions in advance.

The seasons shape what each stay is. The site puts the valley at roughly 3,000 feet, with about 73 inches of snow a year and up to 16 hours of daylight at the summer solstice.