Amy grew up driving up to Idyllwild from Nuevo as a summer camp kid and a snow day tourist, came to the mountain for a six-month construction job, and never left. She has waited tables, run a retail shop, started a mural festival, founded Dick's Dogs out of a gin-tonic joke, and spent a decade figuring out that a small town is not a quiet life — it is just a very loud one in a very small room. 

Amy grew up in Nuevo, a small community on the outskirts of Hemet, and spent her childhood driving up to Idyllwild the way Inland Empire kids do: for the snow. There is a slope along the highway where day-trippers used to pull over to sled, and locals called it Diaper Hill — a nod to the diapers and other debris they left behind. Someone has since bought the land and rechristened it Morningwood, which she finds very funny. That was her hill as a little girl. She grew up being exactly the kind of tourist locals sometimes complain about, and it gave her a permanent soft spot for the chaos of snow days.

She first came to the mountain properly as a teenager, attending summer camp here. Her husband Richard lived in Idyllwild in his early twenties when he was running a record shop called Hungry Heart, which had locations across the region and a particular pull toward this town. They met years later at a Starbucks in Hemet — she was working there while going to school, he owned the record shop she'd grown up browsing — and their first date was at Joan's, the bar that once sat in the town circle, for a show sponsored by Hungry Heart. The band was Graham Rabbit. The singer still plays up here, and has something of a local cult following.

That was nineteen years ago.

A Wild Leap of Faith

They were living in Phoenix when a construction job offer came in — Amy had spent years in job site management, coordinating large projects and moving parts. The job was in Idyllwild, for about six months. Richard was still in Phoenix managing a Trader Joe's, her parents lived thirty minutes down the mountain in Nuevo, and the kids were young. She brought them up with her. Richard came on weekends.

A few months in, they looked at each other and realized they didn't want to leave. Richard quit Trader Joe's, came up the mountain, and landed a job as floor manager at the Brew Pub through his old friendship with Frank Ferro. Amy's construction job moved to Los Angeles. She did two weeks of commuting and lasted exactly that long. She had spent years waiting tables before construction — she knew she could go back. "It was just kind of like a wild leap of faith," she says. "We can make this work in Idyllwild. This feels like a good place for us." So she walked into Mile High Café and asked the owner, Nam, for a job.

She tells the story of that interview with real warmth. Nam asked her age during the first few minutes, which caught Amy off guard until she understood: in Nam's culture, it was about knowing where to rank someone in terms of respect. Amy was older than the other servers and earned a high rank. She worked for Nam for a few years and learned, she says, what it looks like to own your space as a woman. When Amy eventually went out on her own, Nam was her biggest cheerleader.

Before the food truck, there was a retail shop. Wild Idy ran for eight years, curating gifts and objects made by small American brands, prioritizing female-owned brands and makers of color whenever possible. She loved it. It was how she met artists, built relationships, expressed herself in the town's commercial life. She closed it not because it failed but because the town caught up: when they opened, there were a couple of cool gift stores in Idyllwild. When they closed, there were dozens. The market had changed and she changed with it.

Pints in the Pines

Before Dick's Dogs, Amy and two of her closest friends, Jane and Marla, who now owns Arts Department, started something called Pints in the Pines — part mural festival, part beer festival, three years running during COVID. They brought artists to paint large-scale murals across town and raised money for local and global charities, including ARF, Wild Idyllwild Tree Foundation, and Living Free. A thousand people showed up each year.

Before that, the only mural in town was the firefighter painting on the back of the library. Now murals are everywhere. Amy is fine with not getting credit for that. She just likes that new artists putting up large-scale work aren't meeting the same resistance she did. One person called code enforcement on them twice a day for six months, until the county told that person they could no longer call because it was bordering on harassment.

She also likes the mural on the fireplace in one of her spaces in town — the artist's interpretation of the legend of Tataviam, where a spirit is bound to the mountain between a condor and a serpent. It's very much, she says, a nod to where all of this really comes from.

Dick's Dogs and Pearl Clutching

Dick's Dogs is a food truck, and the name is exactly what you think it is. Her husband's name is Richard — Dick for short — and Amy, a self-described feminist, finds it genuinely funny that the name makes people clutch their pearls. The Rotary Club wouldn't cut their ribbon. The local concert series won't let them set up. She still donates to their events when they ask, which they do. "You don't have to think I'm appropriate for the concerts for me to think the concerts should continue," she says.

The idea was born in 2020, on a silly night with her husband and her best friend, everyone drinking gin and tonics and laughing about what they would call things on the menu. A chili dog called the Dirty Dick. It started as a joke. Then COVID arrived, and the joke started to feel like a plan.

Food had always been the family language — her first jobs were restaurant jobs, it was just always the water they swam in. When the pandemic closed the town down and they found themselves with time on their hands, the food truck idea started to feel serious. A mobile kitchen they own outright, can take anywhere, don't have to leave behind if they change locations. She understood the permitting through her construction background. They built it out and drove it up the mountain.

She will tell you they take the hot dogs very seriously. They make their own sauces and pickles. They're switching to beef tallow for the fries. They source what they can locally. They tried making their own corn dogs until they grasped what a mess that is. "My husband is a big believer that you're never too full for a hot dog," she says. And when it all starts to feel like too much: "Every time it feels too serious, we're like — it's just hot dogs. This literally started as a joke. This is fun for us."

Her daughter — now studying film at the Idyllwild Arts Academy — is, in Amy's words, an absolute badass in that truck. The family runs the line together on weekends. Cotton, her twelve-year-old, has been homeschooled his whole life, which works because their weekend is Tuesday and Wednesday — the nature of the restaurant life. The kids grew up as mountain kids in the truest sense: outside constantly, connected to the seasons, part of a homeschool community rich enough that they have never been short of friendships or adventures. On their days off, the family dumps their phones. They play board games. They make snack boards and sit around the table together.

Bitch, Please

Amy has been called low class on the internet by a woman she had served breakfast to for years. She has had someone predict her business would be doomed to fail, identified that person at the post office, introduced herself, and confronted them about it. She used to absorb those moments in silence. Then a fellow business owner was rude to her in a room full of women, and she realized she was done with that. "This man counted on me being more polite than him," she says. "I'm not doing that to myself anymore." Now, if you've already decided what you think of her, she's fine with it. "People who have made up their mind about me will have done so regardless. If you think I'm a bitch, I'm okay with that."

She joined a book club a few years ago. It changed her life. A handful of women who didn't know each other, meeting regularly, talking about books and perimenopause and how to take up space. She talks about them the way people talk about finding something they didn't know they needed.

Behind her house in Pine Cove's Dutch Flat neighborhood is 1,300 acres of water district land: no trails, no cars, nothing but unobstructed forest. Every day there are bobcats, coyotes, deer. The family has chickens and bunnies. They lose the occasional chicken to a predator and still manage to watch the coyotes with appreciation. They have a gate that opens onto that land, and if someone is having a meltdown, the instruction is: go dip your toes in the dirt. Look around. Come back.

She grew up in a town the same size as Idyllwild that had one gas station and one restaurant. "We're so rich in community here," she says. "That's what the spark is." The clearest proof of it came the week after the Cranston Fire evacuation lifted. For a brief period, you couldn't come back up the mountain unless you could prove residency. When locals were finally allowed to return, the brewery filled up wall to wall — every single person a local, all of them raw and relieved, moving from table to table, hugging people they hadn't seen in weeks. "No one complained about the crowds during that week," she says. "It was completely packed and no one was mad about it because we were just so relieved." Every couple of years, something happens that reminds her exactly why they are here. That week was one of them.

"You have to live with intention to be here," she says. "And for most people, that's the whole appeal."