2020 Summer Travels Part B

 After a few weeks stay in Wyoming, we traveled across Montana to Butte where we stayed for a month.  Butte is in the far western part of Montana and is in the heart of the mountains. It is also the highest in elevation of all the major Montana cities. For most of the summer, the high temperatures are in the 70s and 80s. We were snowed on in September.

Any direction you travel from Butte you are surrounded by beautiful mountains, lakes and rivers. The mountains are highly mineralized and were the site of some of the early gold rushes.  That allows us to pursue another of our favorite activities; visiting old mining districts and ghost towns.  These towns are usually reached after driving miles of back roads which is an added bonus for us.

Scenes like this are common in Western Montana.

 The ghost town of Bannack is now a state park and the buildings have been stabilized. Gold was first discovered here in 1862 and the population swelled to 3000 people.

Inside the doctor's office, there was a hand operated vacuum cleaner, shown on the left, and a hand operated washing machine, on the right,  I do not know the purpose of the device in the center. Can anyone help?

 

Another ghost town we visited was Comet. As many as 300 people lived here in 1885.  Comet has not been stabilized and is actually on private property.  It is for sale if anyone is interested.

  This town is unusual because it is one of the very few ghost towns that still has a standing mill.

Our kind of road.

Near the town of Anaconda is an old smoke stack that was used by a large copper smelter that has been torn down. The stack is so large that the entire Washington Monument could be placed inside with room to spare.  For a stunt, someone lifted a Jeep to the top of the stack and drove it around the rim.  The site is now a state park but it is so contaminated that this is as close to it as you can get.

On a ridge above the town of Butte is an enormous copper mine.  It started out as an underground mine but was changed to an open pit mine.

This pit is just one small part of the mine and is now filled with very nasty stuff that they are trying to clean up.

The statistics of the underground mines are so amazing that I took a photo of this sign. It is hard to get my mind around some if this.

This is called a headframe.  They are constructed above a vertical shaft of a mine and are used to lift men, equipment and ore into and out of the mine.  There are many of these headframes that can be seen on the ridge above Butte.  Information from the visitors center says that they are all lighted up at night. I don't know if this is still done because I never made it into town at night.

I consider the Lewis and Clark journey one of mankind's greatest trips. We have visited Lewis and 

Clark sites from the junction of the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers, to the Pacific Ocean where they spent their second winter. There are few sites where archaeologists can pinpoint an exact spot where one of them stood but here, near Dillon, MT, is one of them. William Clark climbed this outcrop of rock to view the next leg of his journey.

  

Just looking at what he saw.

Just east of Dillon is Beaverhead Rock. Yea, I know.  It doesn't look like a beaver head to me either, even from the other side.  When Sacagawea saw this rock, she knew she was in the territory of the tribe from which she had been kidnaped. 

Darn beavers

In the the eastern end of the relatively wild and undeveloped Centennial Valley of Montana lies the Red Rock National Wildlife Refuge.This 50,775-acre refuge was established in 1935 to protect the breeding ground of the Trumpeter Swan. We arrived here after a 30 mile backroad journey. 20 miles of the trip were on gravel roads. Places like this is why they call Montana the Big Sky State.

Of course, we found a socially distant lunch spot.

From Montana, we traveled to Island Park, Idaho which is about 15 miles west of the west entrance of Yellowstone National Park.  More of our fall travels to follow.