Serene Wandering

We go to a lot of museums. Nearly every town has one or two or three. I love them but sometimes Randy takes a break and stays home. He did that in Bozeman – but not due to museum fatigue.

It rained a lot during our three days in Bozeman and we ended up with leaks in the same two spots he had fixed before. Handy Randy was very unhappy to spend parts of two days drying the carpet and subfloor again. It was too cold outside to reseal anything so he dried it out, taped it up, and will have to wait for warmer weather to tackle it again.

I escaped to the Museum of the Rockies on the Montana State University campus. The big deal at this museum is the impressive dinosaur collection.

The Bozeman museum boasts the largest collection of triceratops specimens in the world. Triceratops is the most common dinosaur found in the Hell Creek Formation which encompasses parts of Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota.

For many years, I learned enough about dinosaurs to stay ahead of my kindergartners. I find them interesting but was more interested in the museum’s visiting exhibit on The Oplontis Project.

Oplontis , along with Pompeii, was destroyed by the Mount Vesuvius eruption in AD 79.

Although Oplontis has been known for many years, the University of Texas began the first ever comprehensive assessment and examination in 2006.   They are focusing on two adjacent villas. A Montana State University art history professor works with the project examining remnants of frescos that adorned villa walls.

The surviving artifacts are fascinating.

 

In Room 10 of Villa B, excavations found 54 skeletons of men, women and children. Skeleton 27 had a purse and box containing a large amount of jewelry and coins – perhaps the villa proprietress.

It is amazing the things you find in a Montana Museum! The same can be said of Wyoming Museums!

In Cody, we spent most of a day at the Smithsonian affiliated Buffalo Bill Center of the West. There are five museums in the complex and we enjoyed wandering through and examining exhibits in the Natural History Museum and the Plains Indian Museum.

We walked through the Western Art Museum but we are “art impaired” and the audio tour wasn’t working well enough to help us out.  We were in and out fairly quickly.

We are also “gun impaired” or at least mostly “gun uninterested.” Even so, the sheer quantity of guns was impressive. I was told there are 3500 guns on display with another 2500 in reserve. An expansion of the facility is in the works. Handguns, rifles and various other firearms are displayed both by year and by manufacturer. If you are into guns – the Cody Firearms Museum should be on your bucket list.

We were primarily interested in Buffalo Bill Cody, namesake for the museum and town. He began his work life at age eleven following his father’s death. He worked for a transport company and perhaps for the pony express. Cody received the Medal of Honor in 1872 after serving in the Union Army and was a scout for the US Army during the Indian Wars.

He earned the Buffalo Bill moniker as a supplier of buffalo meat for Kansas Pacific Railroad workers. Reportedly he killed more than 4000 buffalo in 1867 and 1868, but supposedly never killed for sport.

He founded Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1883 and took the very large company on tours throughout the United States and Europe.

In 1887 his company performed for Queen Victoria on the occasion of her 50th Jubilee. He became an international star.

Bill Cody married Louisa Frederici as a young man and they had four children together. Two died very young and a third died as a young adult. The marriage was rocky during their 51 years together.   Bill was rarely home given his military career and his refusal to take Louisa along when traveling with his western shows. At one point they divorced in scandle but eventually reunited.

Buffalo Bill Cody did not handle money well and died a poor man. He left his western show legacy and the namesake town of Cody. In 1901, on Cody’s main street, he built a saloon and hotel and named it for his surviving daughter, Irma.

We ate breakfast at the Irma, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

We saw the bar that Queen Victoria sent him in thanks for his Wild West Show’s visit to London.  The cherry wood bar cost $100,000 in 1900. It was made in France, shipped to New York, railed to Montana and brought to Cody by wagon.

We are finding interesting things out here in museums and old hotels!

Traveling full time is a lifestyle with wonderful gifts. Of course, there are people and things we miss from our old life, but we have experiences on the road we just wouldn’t have staying in Boise.  Being near Kalispell has highlighted that once again.

One of the best gifts of the lifestyle is seeing friends and family that we wouldn’t see otherwise. We’ve also been able to connect again with people we’ve met while traveling. We always have such a good time!

This week we were able to see former Boise friends, Lori, Mindy and Travis who moved to Kalispell about fifteen years ago. We enjoyed dinner, conversation and the opportunity to meet Mindy’s family.  We missed Mark, their husband and father, who passed away during the intervening years.

We had a wonderful time catching up with their lives and seeing Lori’s lovely Montana cabin. They welcomed us so graciously, thank you!

Another gift of the road is to see and explore some really beautiful places – places like Glacier National Park!

We drove east across the park on the Going to the Sun road.

Construction of the Going to the Sun road began in 1921 and was completed in 1932 . The road is a National Historic Place, a National Historic Landmark and Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. The narrow two lane road hugs the mountainside and crosses the continental divide at Logan Pass. It is just short of 50 miles long.

The road is only open for a few months each summer due to snow levels that can measure 80 feet deep at Logan Pass. It usually takes about 10 weeks to open the road in the spring and early summer, at a plow rate of 500 feet per day.

We went to Glacier National Park years ago when our family was on a quest to stay in all the Great Lodges of the West. There are four lodges in Glacier-Waterton National Park and we stayed a couple nights in each of them.  As a result, we didn’t feel compelled to see everything we could see this time, we just enjoyed the road and the scenery.

We did drive by Lake McDonald Lodge – It looks the same, just a grayer shade of brown.

What a gift to travel the Going to the Sun road on a beautiful day in late September!  The road could be closed in just a few short weeks.

When we exited the park on the east side, we looked for a place to have lunch but found that almost everything was closed for the season. The place we did find was closing two days later so our choices were limited – but we managed.

We drove back towards Kalispell along the southern border of the park and went to an observation deck above a natural goat lick. We even saw goats! The people there before us said there were two adults and three kids. I’m not sure we saw them all, or at least not very well, but I did get a picture of two of them preparing to swim back across the river.

One of my favorite gifts of the road is learning about new places and people and hearing the stories.  I went on a tour of the Conrad Mansion Museum in Kalispell.

The Conrads were the first family of Kalispell and this home is unique in that their youngest daughter lived on the mansion grounds until it was donated to the city as a museum. Ninety percent of the furnishings belonged to the family, something different than most historic homes we’ve seen.

Back at the trailer, Randy participated in another of the “gifts of the road” – non stop maintenance on our rolling home.

He found that one of our gray water tanks, the one associated with the kitchen sink, has a crack in the bottom. He has tried a few “solutions” but it is still a work in progress. I’m confident he will get it fixed.

We have been staying at a campground in a small town south of Kalispell called Lakeside. It too is closing for the season after tonight and we will be heading south to Bozeman to the one and only campground that is still open there.

We’ve enjoyed some small town quaintness while we’ve been here. This police car is moved to a new location each day but the police mannequins never get a day off!

We have also been fortunate to get the local paper as a benefit of our campground stay. Much of the information didn’t mean anything to us but we did find the people-bear interaction stories interesting.  We also enjoyed the police blotter reports.  Here is a sample!

8:31 a.m. A bear destroyed a chicken coop on Kuzmin Lane in Coram. Now seven of the original 11 chickens have gone missing.

10:34 a.m. A Kalispell woman reported that the neighborhood woman has the wrong idea about her.

Until we meet again from Bozeman….

 

When we arrive in a town I typically look at Trip Advisor to find the “must dos”  in the area. For Missoula, must dos 1-5 are:  A Carousel for Missoula, Garnet Ghost Town, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Aerial Fire Depot- Smokejumper Center and the University of Montana.

We have no excuses for missing the Carousel or the University of Montana – we just weren’t persuaded. We had just been to two Montana ghost towns and Garnet is way up a dirt road and we just didn’t go. We’ve seen lots of dead animals so no thanks to the Elk Foundation. We toured the  Smoke Jumper Unit in Winthrop, Washington a couple years ago and assumed Missoula’s would be similar. I don’t mean to disparage any of these places because they all get terrific reviews and are surely worthy of a visitor’s time.

Instead, we went all the way down the Trip Advisor list to #8 Fort Missoula Museum and #23 The Historic Ninemile Remount Depot.

Fort Missoula has an interesting, and varied history.   It was established as a permanent military post in 1877 at the request of locals who feared Indian conflict, even though nothing problematic had ever occurred here.

Almost immediately, the presiding captain received orders to meet and turn back the Nez Perce Indians, led by Chief Joseph. The Nez Perce simply went around the soldiers’ barricade in Lolo Canyon and the site was subsequently called “Fort Fizzle.”   (The Nez Perce were en-route to ask for support from the Crow but were denied by Chief Plenty Coups. We learned about Plenty Coups, and his pledge not to fight the white man,  when we volunteered at the Montana historical park maintaining his homesite.)

The 25th Infantry Regiment arrived at Fort Missoula in May 1888. It was one of the segregated units of the Army known as Buffalo Soldiers. The 25th were part of an experiment  equipping regiments with bicycles to determine their viability for military use in different terrains.

Training trips included excursions to Lake McDonald in what is now Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park and St. Louis, Missouri. Although the trips were successful, the overall decision was to discontinue bicycle equipped regiments.

Fort Missoula was used for training through World War I, abandoned for a time, and then used as a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the 1930s.

When World War II began, one thousand Italian men caught in limbo were brought to Fort Missoula to wait out the war. Sixty eight had been workers at the World’s Fair. They were treated well and called Fort Missoula “Bella Vista.”

Over 1000 Japanese Americans were also interred at Fort Missoula. It cost 49 cents per day to hold Italian and Japanese “guests” which included 40 cents for food, five cents for clothing and two cents each for laundry and medical care. (We have visited several internment camps but had never before read that Canada also interred their Japanese citizens, this done at US request.)

Fort Missoula closed down in 1947, eventually becoming the Fort Missoula Museum. Over time other buildings were moved onto the site.

St. Michaels church was built in 1863 and moved to museum in 1981.

A Missoula school group was enjoying a field trip to the museum’s one room school house.

Our second outing, #23 on Trip Advisor, was to the Ninemile Remount Depot.

A brief history:  The Forest Service was created in 1905. Three million acres of Idaho and Montana burned and 82 lives were lost in 1910.  Between 1910 and 1929 Rangers throughout the northern Rockies used horses and mules to develop trails, fire look-outs and fight fires.  In 1930 the Ninemile Remount Depot was established to provide a centralized location to develop stock for the Forest Service.

The remount station buildings were built in 1934 and 1935 by the CCC (more on them later). When the bell rang, it was time for dinner or there was a fire.

When there was a fire, a truck with nine mules, a horse, and supplies for 25 men were moving within 15 minutes.  The truck stopped briefly at the scales to ensure bridges along the way could handle the load.

Today, the remount depot is a historical site but also a working ranch. There are fewer mules and horses and the work is typically trail maintenance instead of fire suppression.

 

When leaving the Remount Depot, we saw a sign for the Ninemile CCC Camp. Trip advisor didn’t even list that!

We went up the bumpy road a few miles and saw the remains of the nation’s largest Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Over 500 young men worked from this location.

CCC workers built campgrounds, buildings, bridges, irrigation systems and much more all over our country during the Great Depression. They made $25 per month, $20 of which was sent home to families.

Today, all that remains is a partial foundation for one barracks and the chimney from the officers’ quarters.

Of course, the results of CCC work remain all across our country. We see them all the time in our “wild life on (the) road.”

After ignoring it previously, we did follow Trip Advisor’s recommendation for a restaurant for my birthday breakfast.

We went to Paul’s Pancake Parlor, a popular place.

Randy had his usual chicken fried steak and eggs but I followed the pancake theme, ordering them Swedish style.  I learned to eat rolled pancakes from my Swedish grandfather but hadn’t eaten them that way in many years. Remembering you Grandpa Edd!

The campground we stayed in near Butte was one of my favorite campgrounds anywhere. The sites were spacious, the scenery was beautiful, and Elko and I enjoyed the cows.

Sometimes the cows seemed concerned about Elko and as though they were trying to determine how one of the calves got out. Other times Elko would decide they were too close to our trailer and move them off. He showed us years ago that he could herd cows, a skill he learned in his life before us.

The other reason this campground was ideal was for its location.  We saw so much during our week in the area that I’ve already written two blogposts about places we visited, and now I write a third. This time our trip went north to Deer Lodge to visit the Grant-Kohrs Ranch and the Old Prison Museum Complex.

Grant-Kohrs is a national historic site and a working ranch. It was deeded to the National Park Service by Kohrs family decedents as a way to preserve history and the ranch.  It opened to the public in 1977.

The first owner, Jimmy Grant, became one of the original Montana cattle barons. After the Civil War, cattle were scarce in the east and the western cattle industry filled the need. Cattle barons developed herds, mostly grazing on open range, and drove them to towns where trains moved the cattle east for slaughter.

Conrad Kohrs started his business by buying cows from Jimmy Grant, butchering them  locally and selling the meat to miners in the area. Conrad Kohrs eventually bought the ranch and herds from Jimmy Grant, who returned to his native Canada.

The original ranch house was expanded after Conrad Kohrs married Augusta.  They, along with Conrad’s brother, ran the ranch and other business interests for many years.  Grandson Conrad Warren began managing the ranch in 1932.   His wife, Nell, was responsible for recognizing the historic value of the ranch and was instrumental in saving the documents and items which reveal so much today.

As a historic ranch, period methods are still used, including blacksmithing needed repairs.

They also grow hay for the cattle herd which is maintained at about 100 head.    Near fields use horses and plows while outer fields use modern techniques.   The Beaverslide method of stacking hay began in southwestern Montana and makes “bread loaf” hay stacks.  Hay is pulled off one end of the loaf when needed.

Resident cattle and horses are joined by national forest service horses during the winter months.  A reduced crew cares for the ranch and all animals.

The very stable fence uses lodgepole pine and does not require sinking posts into the rocky ground. It takes eight conservation youth working hard all summer to replace one mile of jack fence.

There are many exhibits around the ranch, some to see and some to experience!

Charles Goodnight is credited with creating the first chuckwagon while preparing for a cattle drive. He, like other cooks,  was the most important person on the cattle drive and made $40 per month.

We enjoyed our visit to the the Grant-Kohrs Ranch and then we moved down the road a few miles to the Old Montana Prison and Auto Museum.

The Old Montana Prison opened in 1871. Plagued with inadequate funding, first from the territory and then the state, the warden received approval to use convict labor to build additional cell buildings and walls.

 

Overcrowding was a constant problem throughout the use of the prison.   Frank Conley  became warden in 1890 and worked for 30 years to provide jobs and opportunities within the prison to rehabilitate prisoners and keep them productive.    Other wardens took a different approach but still had to deal with underfunding and overcrowding.

Both factors contributed to a riot in 1959 that made the national news.  Ringleader Jerry Myles and two accomplices seized rifles in both cell houses. They held 26 prison employees and other inmates hostage for 36 hours.  Deputy Warden Ted Rothe was killed.

The Montana National Guard ended the riot with tear gas and an anti-tank bazooka. The damage from the bazooka is visible on tower five where the ringleaders were holed up. Montana National Guardsman stormed the prison and regained control.

There are five museums in the prison museum complex. We only had time to take a quick look at one more, The Car Museum. There are 160 nice cars here!   Sixty percent are owned and on loan by the proprietor of the local saw mill.

We spent a week near Butte, and didn’t see it all.    There is always so much to do and see and write about!

We traveled up a steep and winding mountain road to Granite Ghost Town State Park. We didn’t need 4-wheel drive, but our truck’s high clearance was a good thing. Four miles up we found the remnants of a 1890s silver mine and boomtown.

Three thousand people once lived in Granite which had a library,  hospital,  school,  newspaper, saloons and churches.  Chinatown and a red light district were nearby.

The largest building in town was the miners’ Union Hall. It was a three story building with union offices, a recreation hall and an event center with a special “spring floor” for dancing.

Of course, Granite was here because of the nearby silver mine.   Interesting tidbit, the mine backers gave up on the venture and sent a message to end operations. The message was delayed and what should have been the last shift found the silver that was eventually worth $40,000,000.

The 1893 silver crisis closed the mine and, like many other mining boomtowns, Granite faded away.

 

Randy shows off a 100+ year old square nail and a cable with 32 strands.  The cable was used to trolley the ore to another plant 8,750 feet down the mountain side.  That is a long cable, since it had to run back up the hill too.  That is at least 17,500 feet of cable, or about 3.3 miles worth.

Back down the mountain in Phillipsburg, we had lunch and then went to the highly recommended Sweet Palace. What a candy store!

Randy loves salt water taffy and they had so many flavors made on the premises.  I asked him to get me a few pieces of licorice taffy but he didn’t want to contaminate his bag.   So I got my own and gathered a few other flavors he wouldn’t like.   Meanwhile Randy filled a second bag! I got a few dark chocolate covered pretzels and a few hard candies and pretty soon we had $29 worth of candy. Crazy for people who don’t eat much candy!

Our fun continued at Montana Gems. We bought a 35 pound sack of gravel and sifted and washed through it looking for sapphires.

After we found ten sapphires, employee Doug went through our tailings and found three we had missed.

The fun final results were 13 sapphires found, 7 of which are worth cutting, totaling 9.3 carats. (The six smaller sapphires were 3.75 carats combined.)   We could have had them cut for $20 each but since I don’t know what I would do with them, we just took them home. Something to think on….

 

 

When we set off on this journey two and a half years ago, we didn’t realized it would be a lesson in mining. We have seen gold, silver, copper and iron mines across the west and in Minnesota. We have been underground numerous times and have looked out at open pit mines with sadness. I can even write a coherent paragraph about mining with very little fact checking. Immersing ourselves in mining wasn’t the goal but here we are in Butte, at the foot of the Richest Hill in the World.

We toured the Copper King Mansion, home of William Andrews Clark. A former school teacher, Clark avoided being drafted into the Civil War and traveled west to pursue mining. He made a little money mining in Colorado and Bannack, Montana but made much more by establishing a trade route to Salt Lake City and overcharging other miners for needed supplies.

Clark purchased six area mines and became one of three copper kings in Montana.

Clark’s business interests were varied and he was once the second richest man in America. His railroad interests intersected in an area that became Las Vegas, Nevada.  The encompassing Clark County was named for him, as was Clarkdale, Arizona.

The Clark family gave philanthropically to causes around the country including museums, a library, a memorial home, an orphanage, a camp, and an art collection.

Less admirably,  Clark bribed Montana legislators to send him to the US Senate reportedly saying “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.” The US Senate refused to seat him because of the scandal but one term later Clark won election and served as the US Senator from Montana.

Construction began on the Butte mansion in 1884 and was completed 4 years later at a cost of a half million dollars – a half day’s wage for Clark. It was one of seven mansions the family owned, six in the US and one in Paris. After family members living in the home died, it and interior items were sold. The mansion served a variety of purposes until it was purchased by the Cote family 40 years ago.

The Cote family spent much time and money restoring the mansion and furnishing it with period pieces. A few Clark family items were purchased or donated back. Today it is a reasonably priced bed and breakfast with rooms that must be vacated for tours between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm.

We also visited the World Museum of Mining. It has acres of exhibits and a recreated mining town. They offer an underground tour but we chose to pass this time.

There is a large exhibit of the many rocks and minerals found in the Butte area.

Randy’s Ben and Jerry’s T-shirt glowed like the minerals under the ultraviolet light!

Labor Unions once flourished in Butte and the city was called the Gibraltar of Labor. When the mines were sold to corporate America, the labor situation worsened and became dangerous. During World War I the emphasis was “just get the ore out” and the labor situation deteriorated even more. There was a period of union suppression until the New Deal allowed for unions once more.

The Granite Mountain Memorial provides the opportunity to remember 168 miners who died in the Speculator Mine from an accidental fire and the subsequent smoke and poisoned air. The memorial site has audio readings of letters the trapped miners wrote to loved ones during the day or two before they died. The accident on June 8, 1917 remains the world’s largest hard rock mining disaster.

Also commemorated are the 2500 Butte miners who died from mining related causes between 1870 and 1983.  That’s a lot of men.

Mining in Butte has the good (wealth and employment), the bad ( accidents, illness, death and labor unrest) and the super toxic.  See the Berkley Pit….

Once underground mining strategies became less profitable, the Berkley Pit was dug to continue mining copper and molybdenum, a steel hardener. Operations began in 1955 and were shut down in  1982.   The pumps keeping ground water out of the pit and out of the underground shafts were then turned off. The water level in the pit rose and was found to be toxic with high levels of minerals, sulphuric acid and arsenic.  The pH levels measure 2.5 instead of the normal 7.

The Berkley Pit has been a Superfund Site since the 1980s with efforts focused on cleaning the water before it reaches critical levels and backfills into the Clark Fork River, projected to happen in 2023.

This plant has cleaned the water enough to be used in other mining operations,  slightly delaying the rise,  but not enough to be released.

The ramifications of failing seem disastrous for Butte and the environments downstream.   Residents seem to have confidence in the scientists working on the problem.  Let’s hope they are right!

Montana is Big Sky Country and the views reflect that nickname.  We saw a variety of them in the last few days.

Traveling from Bannack towards Butte we viewed two roadside Montana State Parks, both marking historical sites. The first was Clark’s Lookout – think  Lewis and Clark.

An easy walk up a short trail takes you to this large granite monument depicting the spot where William Clark stood as he viewed the landscape and took three compass readings.  He gathered coordinates in preparation for making maps when the Corps of Discovery expedition was completed.

A few miles down the highway we viewed Beaverhead Rock. This formation, resembling a beaver’s head while swimming, was the landmark Sacagawea recognized when traveling with the Corps of Discovery. Seeing it, she knew they were close to the Shoshone lands that had been her childhood home.

Our home for the next few days is an RV park with a view!  We are in the middle of a wide valley with mountains around us.  We even have cows that wander by once in a while.

 Yesterday’s sunrise was so beautiful that Elko and I sat outside curled up in a blanket with the remains of a Starbucks Mocha.  Since he didn’t want the blanket, and didn’t have the mocha, Elko wasn’t too impressed and went back inside.   I thought it was lovely.   Cold, but lovely.

Also lovely,  is a large white statue up on the mountain.   We noticed it when we traveled through Butte in a mad dash last summer and hoped that someday we would come back and see what it was all about. That someday was yesterday!

The story of the statue began with a man’s concern for his ill wife and his promise to build a monument to Mary, Mother of Jesus, if his wife survived. It took this man and his friends, and eventually many in the community of Butte to give  “donations of time, money, land, equipment, manpower and a wealth of love and faith…” to build the 90 foot statue, Our Lady of the Rockies.

The story is really quite inspiring.   Many of the men who held onto this dream for six years were unemployed miners. The welder who became the sculptor had never done anything like it before, even on a small scale. After the road was widened and a site prepared, the six large sections of the steel statue were individually helicoptered onto the site and layered one atop the other.  The section with the hands barely averted catastrophe.

Completed as a tribute to all mothers, Our Lady of the Rockies sits on the continental divide, at 8510 feet, and overlooks the town of Butte.

 

We got a chuckle over our 70ish bus-driver/tour guide who knew just the right vantage point (lying down) to get her tourists and the Lady of the Rockies in the view finder.

Tours, tributes and memorials help support the Lady of the Rockies.  A chapel for special events has been built and a tram to go up and down the mountain is planned.

We have one more southwest Montana big sky view to close out this blog post.  Still from the Lady of the Rockies site – this one is just looking the other way!

 

 

 

 

 

Our first night out of Boise was spent in Arco, Idaho. We have been there before so didn’t re-visit Craters of the Moon National Monument or the Atomic Museum, both of which we enjoyed previously and recommend.

We stayed at the Mountain View RV park with a good view of Number Hill memorializing the local high school classes since 1920.

While setting up, Randy noticed the electrical pedestal was arcing so we moved to another site.  He was in the middle of repairing our pocket door, cutting an access hole and re-attaching the rails, when the power at our new site fluctuated due to low voltage. We have a monitoring system to evaluate incoming power and the level dropped to 105 volts when it should have been between 115 and 120.

We switched our appliances over to propane to avoid damaging those systems and very shortly the furnace stopped working. It runs on propane and the 12 volt system so it didn’t make sense that it was part of the power problem.   It took a couple of very cold hours for Randy to get it working again. After researching the problem he discovered the furnace sensors use microvolts and that just a little bit of dust can keep them from working correctly. He was skeptical but disconnected the connector from the furnace controller board, blew on it, reconnected it, and the furnace worked again. Whoo-hoo!

We were very happy, not just to be warm, but without our propane furnace we would have had to change our travel plans. Our next stop was a campground without hook-ups and the night time temps were projected to be in the low 40s.

On our drive from Boise to Arco and beyond we saw lots and lots of raptors. We counted for a while but stopped in the 50s.  We  saw sections where 8 of 10 telephone poles had a raptor on top.

We also saw them on irrigation apparatus. There must be a lot of mice in those fields….

Our next stop was Bannack State Park near Dillon, Montana, home of one of the best preserved ghost towns anywhere. Bannack is on the National Register of Historic Places and a National Historic Landmark.

When we arrived we found a beautiful, empty campground. We set up, explored a bit, and were so contented that we asked the rangers if they needed camp-hosts for the next month. They didn’t. (The camp host site had hook-ups but the rest of the campground did not.)

We were eventually joined by one neighboring rig so we invited them over to share our campfire and some peach pie.

We explored the ghost town of Bannack. As my computer keeps trying to auto correct the spelling, I should tell you the town was named after the Bannock Indian Tribe but an error in the 1863 registration process in Washington DC created Bannack instead of Bannock.

Bannack began when gold was discovered in Grasshopper Creek in July 1862. The find initiated Montana’s first gold rush and all the influx and drama that comes with a gold discovery. Bannack’s gold was purer than most, 99.5% rather than 80%.

The population of Bannack ebbed and flowed as different approaches for mining were initiated and abandoned. When the placer deposits were exhausted, miners adopted hydraulic techniques that washed away surfaces to expose bench deposits. The world’s first electric dredges tore at the gravel in Grasshopper Creek, sorting and sluicing from 1895 to 1902. Advances in hard rock techniques enabled additional mining into the 1940s.

As required by the war effort, mining in Bannack stopped during WWII and was never profitable again. The people of Bannack were forced to go elsewhere for work and the original capital of the Montana Territory became a ghost town.

Preservation efforts began in the 1940s with many groups contributing. The town was officially donated to the state of Montana in 1954 with the stipulation that the ghost town atmosphere be preserved.

Sixty buildings remain on site. Most are open for viewing.

This cabin is on the site of the Montana Territory’s  first governor’s mansion which burned in 1900. Supposedly some of the logs from the original mansion were used in building this house.

In a mining town, there are sometimes problems!  The town’s first jail and gallows were built by order of Sheriff Henry Plummer in 1863.

Plummer and two of his deputies were hanged on the gallows in 1864 by vigilantes. The sheriff and his deputies were implicated by a convicted murderer for running a criminal gang called the Innocents. The Innocents were responsible for many robberies and 102 murders. Within 42 days, the vigilantes found and executed 20 members of the Innocents. (Ned Ray, one of the deputies killed, was the great-grandfather of James Earl Ray who killed Martin Luther King Jr.   Hmmm, bad genes?)

The Methodist Church was built in 1877. A traveling pastor, Brother Van, was instrumental in it being built after a feared Bannock Indian attack did not materialize.

This building was the original Beaverhead County Courthouse but when the county seat was moved to Dillon, it eventually became the Hotel Meade.

It has a safe and a graceful stairway at the main entrance. A large kitchen is in the rear of the building with many guest rooms and suites upstairs.

Bannack Masonic Lodge No. 16 built this building in 1874 with their meeting room upstairs and room for the public school downstairs.

While we were there, a group was setting up for Living History Days, a four day event celebrating the early days in Bannack.  Maddox was happy to give us a tour while his family members were setting up in various buildings.  Maddox told us that he and his grandfather had recently been cast in a new movie, the Ballad of Lefty Brown, to be filmed in Bannack.   His uncle is actor Bill Pullman from Spaceballs and Independence Day so acting runs in the family!

There were two pioneer cemeteries nearby but not too many gravestones still visible.

 

 

We  enjoyed Bannack State Park, even without hook-ups!

After more than a month in Boise, we are heading out tomorrow, getting back on the road.   We are glad that we were able to come back and help with our grandson and especially glad to report that he is doing very well.   So, the road beckons.

We have enjoyed doing some of our traditional Boise summer activities like attending the Western Idaho Fair and Idaho Shakespeare Festival with John and Deb. We’ve been out for many lunches and dinners with friends. Randy’s gone golfing and we’ve enjoyed being back at our home church.

We stuck around long enough to attend the Boise State Broncos’ football home opener, another flashback from our former life.  Walking around the campground on game day we met some Washington State Cougar Fans who brought their own cougar!

Although the game ended up closer than it felt like it should have been, the Broncos did win!

 

We also did something totally new in Boise!  We attended the Boise Balloon Festival for the first time in its 25 year run. I’m not sure why we never got there before but when cousins Marilyn and Lynn came through Boise, it seemed the thing to do!

We really enjoyed the Night Glow event – 25 balloons lighting up at one time!  Credit to Lynn for the cool video!

We also managed to purchase a new theater love-seat at a Boise area furniture store.  We had been looking on and off for many  months and finally found one that fit into our limited space and checked off all of our combined boxes.  Unfortunately, we forgot to have a box marked “comfortable.”  We are getting used to it so hopefully we’ll grow to love it.

 

So where are we headed tomorrow?   We’ll overnight near Arco, Idaho and  then head north into Montana, perhaps going as far as Glacier National Park – depending on the weather.  We also intend to visit  Cody Wyoming,  Spearfish South Dakota and a variety of places in between.   It will be our first unscripted/unreserved trip.  We’ll see how “winging it” goes.

We do know that we will meet up with the Boise State Broncos, and friends Kent and Pam, in Laramie for another football game at the end of October.

When we last posted, we were completing our dash across the country due to our toddler grandson’s health concerns.  He had a very serious blood and bone infection likely caused by a scraped knee.   Thankfully, it was caught very early and we are so blessed, happy and grateful to report that he is doing very well!

When we arrived he was crawling or being carried because of pain in the infected foot. Nine days later he is walking with only a slight limp and his blood work has returned to normal levels. He was able to go to “school” and play with his friends for a few hours Thursday and Friday.

That seems to be the working plan for the next week or so. His mom will drop him off at school on her way to work and we’ll pick him up about 10:00 and take him home to play, have lunch and take his midday meds. The aggressive antibiotics will continue for another few weeks but all is looking well for a total recovery. Thanks for the prayers on his behalf!

Getting a campsite in Boise was a challenge – although I don’t know why anyone who doesn’t have to be camping here now would be!  It is miserably hot outside!

When we began our drive home I called our usual campground to get reservations and the desk workers told us they were completely full. The Western Idaho Fair was about to begin and the campground is adjacent to the fairgrounds.

Given the circumstances, and our history with the campground, manager Karen told us to try the other campgrounds in the area and if we couldn’t make something work to call back and she’d try to figure something out.  Everything in Boise was fully booked so Karen worked some magic and got us into an overflow site on the grass. That means we have great power, marginal water access, and no sewer for about three weeks but we are very grateful to have what we have.

The advantage of being on the grass is that Randy was able to spend one very long hot afternoon repairing the trailer again!   He replaced a broken shear spring while lying in the grass instead of lying in dirt or gravel.

A shear spring provides shock absorption between the axle leaf spring and the frame. It had broken on the way east, and although not dangerous, was not good for the trailer.

Once the fair is over and the fair employees have moved on we’ll be able to move into a traditional site for the remainder of our stay. We originally thought we’d be here until the end of September but that is no longer a given. We’ll see how things go but we may leave sooner than that.

For now we have settled into a daily routine of caring for our grandson and being able to spend evenings with friends. Thanks to John and Deb, Kent and Pam, and Darrell and Cindy for making time for us already!