In Boundary County, Idaho, 23 miles from the Canadian border, Boulder Creek Retreat heats two large buildings with a biomass furnace fueled by timber cleared from the property. The retreat’s 120 acres includes lush evergreen forest, but its extensive trail system is overgrown, and clearing underbrush from the woods helps suppress the threat of wildfire.

Boulder Creek Retreat is on a tributary of the Kootenai, behind Clifty Peak. Considering the property’s natural resources, Kinkade thinks it “just makes sense” to heat with wood. “Honestly, if we don’t take care of the forest here on the property, we end up with forest fires,” Kinkade said. “That, and we love the smell of wood smoke.”

Heated by its own wood, Boulder Creek Retreat has big plans to serve the local Bonners Ferry community as a site for weddings, church retreats, community events and reunions for large, widespread families. “That’s really important, to be part of the community and connect with the folks around us and provide them a place to connect as well,” Kinkade said.

The retreat’s Crown Royal biomass furnace, along with energy efficiency upgrades, replaces more than 3,700 kilowatt-hours of power and saves the facility about $3,800 annually. The furnace heats water that is pumped through plumbing to heat exchanges on the existing furnace, which blows hot air throughout the building.

The system is rated to heat up to 10,000 square feet, but with the help of an abnormally warm first winter, it maintained the temperature of two large buildings totaling about 20,000 square feet.

“It allows us to actually manage our own forest, and in the management of the forest, the excess wood that we’re pulling out of the forest for fire management, to use that as heat,” said Boulder Creek Retreat director Seth Kinkade of the new heating system.

Federal funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) helped Boulder Creek cut the costs of its energy upgrade. Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, boosting REAP and delivering grants to thousands of projects that cut energy costs across rural America.

To apply for the grant, Boulder Creek worked with an energy auditor to verify energy savings. “We wanted to build redundancy on the systems we currently have,” Kinkade said. “We were looking for something that we could use with what exists on the property itself.”

They chose a biomass furnace with a high energy efficiency rating and installed insulation as part of the REAP project. “In the basement of most of these structures, there’s very, very little insulation, so we did a lot of sealing and insulation to make sure that all that heat that’s being generated is trapped in the building and not released to the outside,” Kinkade said.

With a robust heating system in place, retreat offerings may include classes, such as herbal medicine or quilting, as well as training programs for firefighters or medical professionals. Kinkade sees Boulder Creek as a place for relaxation, with opportunities for fly fishing, dog sledding and other activities.

The property is the former site of Boulder Creek Academy, a private therapeutic boarding school. Over the years, the residential wilderness school and treatment center served hundreds of students, including the children of celebrities who sought its privacy and structured programming.

In fall 2025, the former Boulder Creek Academy campus will open as North Idaho Classical Academy, a charter school using a Hillsdale College curriculum.

Kinkade came to northern Idaho via Illinois and coastal California, and he describes his adopted home in glowing terms. “We live in one of the prettiest parts of the country,” he said. “You have three different mountain ranges, and they’re all converging on Boundary County. In the middle of those mountain ranges, you have this beautiful river called the Kootenai River.”

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed by the 117th Congress and signed by President Joe Biden, is a piece of federal legislation that aims to reduce inflation by lowering the cost of prescription medications, investing in domestic energy production and promoting clean energy, among other objectives.