Margot Ellison bought the property in the autumn of 2013, when it was three derelict outbuildings and a lot of blackberry. She had spent the previous decade working as a wilderness guide in the Cascades, leading multi-day trips for a company based out of Bend, Oregon. She was good at it, but she was tired of moving. She wanted a place that stayed put. The land had been a small timber operation in the 1970s and the second-growth forest was already thick and quiet by the time she walked it for the first time with a surveyor named Pete Greer, who told her the creek ran year-round. That was enough.
The first cabin, the Creekside, took two winters to finish. Margot did most of the framing herself with help from her brother Cal and a retired carpenter named Bud Holt who lived three miles down the road and worked for coffee and lunch. The wood-fired hot tub was an afterthought, added in the spring of 2016 after a guest mentioned she had driven four hours and the thing she wanted most was to sit in hot water and look at trees. Margot built it from a cedar stock tank and a cast-iron firebox she found at an estate sale in Millhaven. It has been in use every season since. The Ridge Cabin came in 2017, the Bunkhouse in 2019, just before everything got complicated.
Margot Ellison grew up in eastern Washington and spent her twenties leading wilderness trips through the Cascades for a guiding company out of Bend, Oregon. In 2013 she bought a run-down timber property in the forest and spent the next two winters building the first cabin with her brother Cal and a retired carpenter named Bud Holt. She opened Opal Brook Trail in 2014 with one cabin and a hand-painted sign at the end of the gravel road. She still answers every booking email herself. On mornings when there are no guests, she walks the full nine-mile loop before breakfast. She keeps a small vegetable garden behind the main lodge and is a reliable source of opinion on cast-iron cookware.