My Oh My, It's Pie!

A poster for the Apple Day event.

I was looking for more volunteer work(?) and, behold, there it was, right in front of me -- pie!!

One of Thursday's many freshly made pies.

Not just any old pie but hundreds and hundreds of apple pies -- put together Oct. 4 for baking on the 5th and serving today at Hamilton's 33rd annual Apple Day! The Bitterroot Valley once was thought to be the ideal spot for big commercial apple orchards. Money got invested. Trees got planted. And disease took most of them. This was all just after the turn of the last century. But at least one apple orchard remains and new, more resistant varieties are filling in the gaps. Hence, there's a celebration of the historical fruit put on yearly at the Hamilton Farmers' Market and sponsored by the Ravalli County Museum at the Old Courthouse.

Just a few examples on the pie production line.

At the Rocky Mountain Grange, two women with British accents, a young woman from Bombay and a dozen or so Job Corps trainees got some of the rest of us Bitterrooters started in a morning of orderly pie-making chaos.

I walked in, slipped on food-prep gloves and quickly was put charge of butter (cutting sticks into tablespoon-sized chunks and placing one each on top of freshly filled pie shells).

Some extra filling got added after the butter work (apparently, not a single cinnamon-sugar-coated apple slice went to waste!)

My new rolling pin, made of black cherry by Bitterroot artisan Mel Holloway (http://www.madeinmontanausa.com/prod.asp?Type=Detail&RecordID=655), was just one of many pins that shook the prep tables as dough -- produced on site by the Job Corps kids -- got flattened and rounded out for topping pies.

A crimping station...

...and a crimping lesson.

Suju takes pictures of pies to Facebook for her friends and family in India.

Best of all is the scene across the highway from the Grange, in Hamilton -- mountains and NO SMOKE.  Wildfires that for weeks hid mountains from view are gone and crisp cool fall air whooshes through the valley.

On today's cold clear morning, the crowd is bustling at Apple Day.

Carrots compete with...

...apples for attention!

But pie sales are among the most brisk (some pre-baked, others frozen and ready to bake at home). This is the biggest annual fundraiser for the museum, touted as the "Biggest Bake Sale Under the Big Sky" (http://www.brvhsmuseum.org/appleday.html).