Hello Everyone,
I’ve got good news and bad news to start off this week. The bad news is that Shadow Catcher is still in the shop in Missoula, waiting on parts. My new axle housing has made its way all the way from Florida to Indiana where it is currently being rebuilt. They should be putting it on the road to Montana by Friday with it arriving early next week. Once it’s here, it should only take a day or so to get it on and to put everything back together again. I will likely be writing this post from Missoula again next week, making it three weeks since we pulled into town, but I will hopefully be on my way soon thereafter. The good news is that the shop has loaned me a truck in the interim, so I have packed up my camping gear and hit the road in it. I’m very grateful to them for the loaner as it has allowed me to get out and do some exploring this week. It’s not the easiest way to travel, but it sure beats sitting around on my hands in Missoula. I think if I had three weeks to sit there and stew, it would be hard to bounce back from. This week has taken me south through the Bitterroot Valley, across the Big Hole and the Bozeman Trail and is winding up here in Butte, where I am writing to you from today. The weather has been great and I’ve definitely been enjoying myself despite the difficulties of being out here without my van and the stresses involved with that.
After finishing up this post last week, I went out and enjoyed a wonderful night of music with a songwriters’ round at the Zootown Arts Community Center there in Missoula. This event brought together four unique songwriters from around Montana who took turns sharing their songs and the stories behind them. It was the first event of the newly formed Montana Songwriters Collective and it was really enjoyable. After the show, I went down and had a burger at the Missoula Club and then headed back across the river for the night.
I went to the shop on Thursday and picked up the truck which allowed me some freedom to run some errands, get to the gym and formulate some semblance of a plan for the week ahead. My friend, Renee, came up to hang out for the evening which was great. We had some dinner and then went to a comedy show at The Roxy, the theatre right down the road form where I was staying. The show featured female stand-up comedians from around the state and they were really pretty good. We laughed a lot. After the show, we headed across the river and went to a little bar where one of Renee’s friends worked. We had a drink there with him and hung out for a while until she had to head home.
I had to check out of my little apartment on Friday, but it sure had been a great place to stay for the week. With all the rain that came through Missoula last week it was definitely better than hunkering down in my tent. I ran around a bit more in Missoula and then headed south to catch up with Renee down in Stevensville. She is a big-time skydiver and had invited me down to spend the weekend with her and her skydiving friends from Skydive Missoula. I haven’t been skydiving in almost 30 years and it was fun to hang around the shop and get a nice re-introduction to the sport. I did not go myself as it was expensive and my pending van repairs will cost me an arm and a leg, but I enjoyed meeting the gang and watching them jump. The wind picked up in the afternoon and all of the later jumps were cancelled, but there were several loads that went up while I was there. After the shop closed, we all headed back to Renee’s house in Corvallis for a fun night of drinking beer and making pizzas. I really found a lot in common with these folks and had an incredible night of chatting and getting to know them better.
We were up early on Saturday and headed back to the airport for a full day of skydiving (for them). Since it was Saturday and the weather was absolutely beautiful, there were a ton of people there. I think they sent up nine plane-loads over the course of the day with many people making several jumps. I really enjoyed just hanging around the shop which reminded me of the scuba shops I’ve worked in and even, to some degree, my tour guide shops (although those are only for the people working there and our passengers will likely never see them). It was exciting and there were a lot of moving pieces. I got to spend time chatting with the pilot and with the owner and learning about the business and the planes they run. I watched people packing their parachutes all day, which is quite a process and one you absolutely have to get right. There were dogs running around to play with and I read my book for a while and the whole day was just really enjoyable. In the afternoon I went out to grab some lunch and stopped by the old St. Mary’s Mission for a look. This mission was the first non-native settlement in what’s now Montana and was built way back in 1866 by Jesuit missionaries. The church is a beautiful building and definitely worth the detour on my way back to the airport. After the shop shut for the night, we all went out in downtown Stevensville for a sandwich and a couple of beers.
We slept in a bit on Sunday, but made our way back to the airport after a couple of cups of coffee got us energized. Renee made her 99th jump that morning and stuck the landing perfectly. She was going to get her hundredth over the weekend, but her jump buddy couldn’t make it so she decided to call it at just the one for the day and wait until next weekend to hit her milestone jump. There were plenty of other people there to jump though and the day passed just as quickly as Saturday had. I had my camera out a little more, as it gets easier to get some good shots when people are more comfortable around you. At the end of the day, we headed over to the packer, Amara, and her partner, pilot Paul’s house for their weekly “family dinner”. Amara cooked up some amazing salmon and burgers with salad and veggies and mac-and-cheese for the whole gang and it was a real treat. We talked and laughed late into the night. It was a very different weekend from what I am used to, but one I really enjoyed. It’s amazing to have some company now and again.
Renee had to work on Monday, so I thanked her for letting me crash at her place for the weekend and for introducing me to her friend group and then said goodbye for now. I headed just up the road to hike the Blodgett Canyon Overlook Trail which had been recommended to me a few days earlier. This was a short, but sweet three mile loop which had some great viewpoints out over two of the canyons of the Bitterroot Mountains. It was a cool and sunny day and it was so nice to be back on the trail. After my hike, I continued south through the Bitterroot Valley, enjoying the small towns and beautiful mountains on both sides. I particularly liked seeing Trapper Peak, the highest mountain in the range at 10,157 feet.
From there, I continued south and then east and made my way out to Big Hole National Battlefield. This was the site of a major battle in what history remembers at the Nez Perce War. I’ve written before about Chief Joseph and his Wallowa Band of Nez Perce, who had lived for centuries in the Wallowa Valley in what’s now northeast Oregon (I visited there last winter and it was stunningly beautiful). Forced from their homeland and not accepting a move to the reservation, they headed northeast, hoping to cross the border into Canada and join up with Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapa Lakota band there. They thought they had a few days lead on the pursuing U.S. infantry, so they set up camp in the Big Hole where they could rest and prepare food for the journey ahead. They were mistaken and the army came storming down into the valley where they were camped, killing many Nez Perce before they were able to escape. The battlefield was quiet when I arrived and I was able to walk out to the site of the Nez Perce camp which was haunting.
After my visit, I continued east to the tiny town of Wisdom on the Big Hole River (formerly known as the Wisdom River, as it had been named by Lewis and Clark). Wisdom is a cute little speck on the map between the Beaverhead, Anaconda and Pioneer Mountains and surrounded by cattle ranches. The area is famous for the invention of the Beaverslide, a unique machine which allows for tall hay stacks to be built and is both simple and really creative. There is a great little free campground in Wisdom run by the local American Legion and the views of the surrounding mountains were spectacular. I wandered through the town and took some photos before popping into the Antler Saloon for a beer. Sunset over the river was magnificent and it was a lovely and quiet place to spend the night.
I was up early yesterday as it was going to be a busy day. I started my day in the old gold mining town of Bannack, likely named after the local Bannock Indians and misspelled or misread on the original post office application. Bannack was the original Montana gold rush town, tracing its roots back to a placer discovery in 1862. The town would quickly grow to a population of around 10,000 people and was briefly the capital of the newly formed Montana Territory. Gold strikes not far away in what would become Nevada City and Virginia City would begin Bannack’s decline. Mining would continue in Bannack for several decades, but the population would steadily decline and World War II would shrink the town even more. The last residents left in the 1970s and the one-time Montana capital was left to rot. Thankfully people from the local area stepped in and had Bannack designated as a state park and started the work of preserving this historic ghost town. It’s a cool place to visit with many of the buildings still standing including the old brick county courthouse which became a hotel after the county seat was moved to Dillon. There is also a two story building with a school on the ground floor and the Masonic Temple upstairs, which local Masons still use for their monthly meetings. I had been to Bannack once before, but it was great to be back and to be able to explore at my own pace.
From Bannack I continued on down the road to Dillon which grew up as a railroad town in the 1880s. Originally called Terminus as it was the end of the Utah and Northern Railway, it was renamed after Sydney Dillon, the president of the Union Pacific Railway a year after its founding. Dillon was the railroad hub for all of the surrounding gold mining towns, bringing supplies into and gold out from the region. It’s a gorgeous little town with some absolutely wonderful old Victorian buildings and the more I wandered the more I loved it. I had some things I needed to do to help out my folks at home, so I tucked into the library for a bit to get that done. When I finished with that, I went out to see one more thing before leaving Dillon: the final resting place of Pit the Elephant. Pit was working for the Cole Brothers’ Circus when she arrived in Dillon for a performance on August 6th, 1943. Tragically a storm was brewing that day and Pit was struck by lightning, killing her instantly. With no way to move her, she was buried on the spot and her grave is marked behind the rodeo arena at the fairgrounds. The marker says she was 102 at the time of her death, but that seems unlikely as elephants generally don’t live nearly that long, but she did have a long and storied career. It’s nice to see her grave is still being taken care of over 80 years later.
Leaving Dillon, I made a beeline for Nevada and Virginia Cities, two more of Montana’s historic gold rush towns. Nevada City is now a living history museum with buildings brought in from around the state and reconstructed to help tell the story of gold in Montana. Sadly I got there after everything was closed for the day, but I was still able to walk around and read some of the signs and take plenty of photos. To be honest, I probably preferred having it to myself although I’m sure it is interesting to see the inside of many of those old buildings.
From there it was just a hop, skip and a jump up the road to Virginia City which was also pretty closed up for the night. It’s an awesome little town, though, and I enjoyed walking up and down the street and soaking up the history. I stopped in at the Pioneer Saloon for a beer and then wandered down the street to the Bale Of Hay, Montana’s oldest saloon. A bar opened in that building back in 1863, and while it has not been in continuous operation, it is a bar again today (and named after those Beaverslide hay bales I mentioned above). A fire burned up the inside of the bar a few years ago, but the building survived and it’s a nice place for a drink. They also made a mean burger which I was grateful for by that time of the evening. After dinner I took one more stroll around town and then continued on to the small town of Ennis and then north to another free campground on the shores of Ennis Lake. I got there with just enough time to set up before the sun went down (at about 9:30 these days).
This morning I headed back into Ennis for a cup of coffee and some breakfast (I miss my Shadow Catcher most first thing in the morning). I hung around for a little while and then zipped on up the road to Butte. I headed straight for the gym to get in a workout and to get a much needed shower and shave and then came straight to the library to try and get this post done before closing time. Butte is a fabulous old mining town with an incredible assortment of old buildings in a massive historic district. I will probably poke around a little bit this evening, but plan on coming back when my van is fixed and spending a day or two here next week (fingers crossed).
And that’s my week, y’all. I’m really happy to have been able to see as much as I did this week and am grateful to be out of Missoula for a while. I’m going to start making my way back in that direction tomorrow, though, with plenty of things to see between here and there. If the weather is good on Friday, I hope to make it down to see Renee’s hundredth skydive and then we are planning on going to the Zoofest music festival over the weekend. I don’t really have a plan beyond that as it’s going to depend on what’s going on with my van, but generally speaking I am hoping to be on my way down towards Yellowstone to do some backpacking in the very near future. I’m going to poke around Wyoming for a bit and then come north again when Montana trails are snow-free and more accessible. I really appreciate all of you who contacted me this week regarding my van, it meant a lot. I hope you’ll come back next week to see what I’ve gotten up to, and in the meantime keep sending your good vibes our way. Have a great week out there and thank you, as always, for reading.
-Mike