Mountain Madness finds smart ways to keep us clean

One of the greatest things in life is being able to feel really fresh and clean. Just ask anyone who has spent time not being so how refreshed and downright civilized they feel once the dirt and grime is washed away. Jennifer Morsell, owner of Mountain Madness Soap Company in Coeur d’Alene, loves making people feel this way, especially with her homemade bars of soap, bubble bars, bath bombs and lip balms, all made with natural ingredients. Today, she creates and sells several varieties, including lilac and a tangy peppermint, but not too long ago, she had one flavor – green – that she learned from her grandmother. “It’s an old Italian recipe using 60 percent unrefined olive oil, which retains a lot of the olive’s natural green coloring,” Morsell said. “It’s really green as it doesn’t go through straining and cooking and pasteurization that takes all the color out of it, so this gives it a slightly green, creamy color instead of pure white.” Her soaps aren’t just green in color but also “green” environmentally because she likes to use naturally occurring ingredients and most are obtained as locally as possible. Her soap-making efforts began years ago as Christmas gifts for friends while living in North Pole, Alaska, where she was born and raised. Eventually, enough friends started asking her for more that she decided to try this craft as a full-time venture and opened a soap store in Alaska. Morsell now lives in Coeur d’Alene and loves her new hometown. “Coeur d’Alene is home. I don’t think that we will ever live anywhere else,” she said. This year she became a full-time member of the Kootenai County Farmer’s Market after having been a regular vendor for several years. Mountain Madness now has a permanent home at Booth No. 43. “The market is my thing. That is what I am extremely passionate about,” Morsell says. “I think the whole sense of community and supporting other local businesses is what it is all about for us.” The Farmer’s Market isn’t the only place to find Mountain Madness. She’ll also be at the downtown Coeur d’Alene Farmer’s Market this summer as well, and her soaps can be found in area stores like Pilgrim’s Market on 4th Street in Coeur d’Alene and online at www.mountainmadnesssoap.com. The company also is on Facebook and Twitter and she also visits many craft shows through the Northwest. Someday she hopes to have her own store again like she had in Alaska. “I would love to open up a storefront in downtown Coeur d’Alene,” Morsell says. “That’s my dream.” For now, she creates about 200 bars of soap a day in her home office located off the side of the garage behind their house in downtown Coeur d’Alene. She’s been crafting flavors like “Oh My Achy Muscles,” a soap with eucalyptus and rosemary made for people who over-exercise or have done too much yardwork, or “Oh My Stuffy Nose” that features a blend of peppermint, spearmint, rosemary and menthol crystals. “It’s fun to sit out here and make my soap, listen to my music and listen to the chickens. In my blood I will always be a little bit of a hippie,” she said. But even hippies must keep up with the times, and Morsell follows the latest trends in the soap industry. She recently started a line of bubble bars, which are really popular right now. They are a solid bubble bath that has no packaging, and people just break a piece of it off and crumble it into bathtub water. Also new are solid sugar scrubs, which are soap with sugar incorporated into it which acts as a natural exfoliant. A favorite with the kids are bath bombs which are a combination sodium bicarbonate, citric acid and water. When those three ingredients mix you get a chemical reaction that causes fizzing almost like a volcano that kids make for science projects. “It’s more than that,” Morsell states. “It also has bath salts and the scent that make it beneficial.” She’s excited at the possibilities. “We do all of our homework,” Morsell said.”We don’t just make things to make money on it. We do all of our research to make sure that what we are creating is the best we can do.”