Mountain Cloud Creamery

The farm store at 72 Widgren Way in Clark Fork has no one at the till. The creamery’s own shop page says it is always open and runs on the honor system. The Panhandle Farm Corridor’s guide to North Idaho farm stands lists it as open all year, 9 AM to 6 PM daily.

Inside are the products of a small dairy:

• unpasteurized A2A2 Jersey milk by the half gallon
• pints of raw cream, and butter
• fresh ricotta and a Jersey-cow feta
• aged cheese cut in eight-ounce pieces
• a yogurt the farm’s online shop calls “The ONLY Raw (Unpasterurized) Yogurt in town”
• eggs “from happy chickens,” in the online listings
• ice cream by the pint in the warm months, and fudgesicles, which the corridor’s printed guide adds

The shop page says the store holds more than the website shows. The cheeses are made in small batches and aged for different lengths, so what is on the shelf changes through the year.

The homestead covers 76 acres. Matthew and Terces Engelhart keep it, and they call themselves “apple farmers, cheese mongers, dairy maids, and your neighbors.” In the farm’s own account, Matthew loves trees, especially apple trees, and Terces loves “the art and mystery of cheesemaking.”

Seven cows and a paper wrap

In a winter letter posted March 14, 2026, Terces wrote that the farm was milking seven cows and its cheese inventory was growing. That same winter the packaging changed, and every cheese now goes out in “beautiful, breathable paper that keeps them fresh and flavorful.”

The farm’s posts name its calves. Cocoa was born to Lily in October 2025. An earlier post headed “Something new to start November” introduced a heifer calf, Daisy, and her mother, Ellie.

That winter one of the Engelharts’ granddaughters, Kate, moved to the farm to help out. “SHE LOVES ANIMALS,” the letter reads. That spring the farm store carried an Easter basket with chicks Kate had crocheted, alongside chocolates sweetened with coconut sugar.

The same letter recorded the death of Scout, a little dog who “kept us all going with her endless enthusiasm for just about everything.” It added: “Our labs aren’t quite sure what to do without their little buddy.” By September a Russell Terrier named Gem had joined the farm. A photo caption from that month shows Kate welcoming a new calf with Gem.

Mozzarella in September, cider in October

The farm holds paid gatherings, and each one includes a farm tour. Its events page lists two:

• Cheese tasting and mozzarella stretching, September 20th, 3 pm. Visitors taste a variety of the year’s cheeses and practice stretching warm mozzarella curd. Adults pay $15, children nothing, and wine is sold.
• Cider pressing and apple tasting, October 18th, 2 pm. Visitors help press apples and taste the year’s varieties. Adults pay $10, and children under 12 come free.

In a letter dated September 15, 2026, Terces wrote that the farm now has a year-round farm kitchen and may add a few gatherings in the winter months.

Summer takes the cheese into town. At the Farmers Market in Sandpoint in 2026 the farm sold its cheeses by weight, wrapped to order. Terces wrote that this gave customers “a chance to taste and enjoy the beauty of our wheels of cheese.”

Matthew started making grilled cheese sandwiches at the stand, and they were a hit. City rules then moved the stand to Oak Street, where, in Terces’s words, “we were eventually discovered by our loyal followers.” The farm has also offered drop-off for customers in Sandpoint and gift boxes at the holidays.

From Café Gratitude to Clark Fork

Before the cows in Idaho came a restaurant chain in California. A June 2026 Alta Journal article by Lydia Horne reports that Matthew and Terces cofounded Café Gratitude, a chain of vegan restaurants that at one time served more than 10,000 meals a day. Customers ordered by reading affirmations off the menu, such as “I Am Luscious” for a vanilla smoothie, and waiters answered “You Are Luscious.”

The first café opened in San Francisco’s Mission district, and by 2011 there were seven across California. That year two employees sued for wage theft, and the Engelharts closed all eight Northern California cafés. Alta reports that Café Gratitude still has two locations. Matthew had met Terces at Landmark Forum. Her name, the magazine notes, is “secret” spelled backward.

Matthew had milked cows before. In the early 1980s, Alta writes, he bought a farm near Ithaca, New York, with Mollie’s mother, Jeanne, Jeanne’s twin sister Virginia, and Matthew’s brother. They paid their way with carpentry, milking cows, and selling homemade clothes at the farmers’ market.

Later he kept Be Love Farm, a homestead in Vacaville, California, that grew produce for Café Gratitude. It also supplied Sage, the vegan restaurants of his daughter Mollie.

In 2016 a blog post by Terces described Matthew ending 40 years of vegetarianism with a hamburger. It was made from Flower, a cow that had lived on Be Love Farm. The family calls the episode Slaughter-gate. The vegan community was outraged, and Matthew and Terces received death threats. Alta gives Matthew’s explanation: “Cows maintain the grass, predators maintain the herd by culling the weak and sick.”

California, the magazine says, grew inhospitable to the family’s new thinking. Solano County building officials told Matthew he could not keep living in a yurt on his farm. “You’re just taking the frontier ethic and just putting it in the wastebasket,” he recalls thinking.

By 2023 Terces was speaking for Mountain Cloud Creamery in the Local Food Ways session of the Selkirk-Pend Oreille Food Summit. Alta found the couple in their 70s, living in Idaho and running a dairy farm and creamery. Together they have five grown children and 15 grandchildren. The farm’s About page says they look forward to sharing more time with them “in the Pacific Northwest soon.”