Hee Haw: Michael and Dan in Montana
Daniel Emberley, September 2018
Yeah, that should probably be “yee haw”, but Michael keeps mixing it up with a 1970’s country-western comedy show. We’re working our way through visiting all the states, and Montana and Idaho came in at 46 and 47*. Our friend Catie Robbins joined us for this trip, with Glacier, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton National Parks as high points.
Sunday, September 16
Delta Airlines is a much better carrier than we remembered. National to Minneapolis, where we found a See’s chocolate cart, decent shopping, and Lake Wine restaurant for dinner during our change of planes to Missoula. Each flight arrived early, no lost luggage, and pleasant. Missoula’s airport is small, like El Paso’s, which made it easy to grab our bags and jump on the shuttle to their Holiday Inn Express.
Monday, September 17, Missoula
Michael and Catie picked up the car, after some initial confusion about whether our vehicle was in the Hertz or Budget lot (apologies to the person whose Hertz car we locked by accident). Missoula is a sweet college town on the Clarks Fork River. The Smokejumpers Visitors Center, where they train folks to fight forest fires from the air, was closed; we suspect their students were getting hands-on experience fighting fires in Glacier. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation explains the wildlife of the Rockies, with a great nature trail and videos which tried to convince us that hunting is conservation. They give away cool paper elk antler hats.
We shopped around downtown Missoula; enough local stores and crafts to keep us interested. We never figured out why University of Montana’s football team is the Grizzlies, but their other teams have different names. We ate Maria’s Bakery’s lovely large cookies while walking through Caras Park along the Clarks Fork. The river does an interesting plunge in downtown where locals can boogie board as if they’re surfing; fun to watch, then over to the locally-carved Carousel for Missoula and Dragon’s Hollow playground.
The National Bison Range is less than an hour north, and delivered better wildlife viewing than other nature reserves we’ve tried. We saw several herds of bison, coyote, pronghorn antelope, mule deer, and ubiquitous but always fun chipmunks. Amazing switchbacks on the drive, the landscape is as good as the animals. Passed a llama ranch as we left the Range. Saw our first burn area, with good interpretation of how burns grow back and of Glacial Lake Missoula, which carved the Columbia River gorge in Oregon. Old burned over areas are useful; for tourists they offer up vistas that complete forests cannot, and a diversity of plants that could not have existed without the fires.
Driving up the east shore of heavily touristed Flathead Lake reminded me of Lake Winnepesaukee, lots of tourist cabins and resorts. The area is famous for its cherries, which we saw in stores but for us were just expanses of orchards. Locals had decorated hay bales for the autumn, fun to see how stores and clubs transformed them into witches, Yoda, and Nemo. Kalispell is another nice small city, we checked into their Holiday Inn Express and had dinner at Montana chain McKenzie River Pizza. The food was decent, but the décor better, with a canoe suspended over our table and a “grove” of birch trees screening tables. Saw our first of many cowboys, and realized that the soundtrack of this trip was going to be 1970’s light rock. Montanans are still listening to the music of our childhood; lots of Eagles and Gordon Lightfoot. By the end of the trip we were thrilled to get some Katy Perry, anything with a beat.
Tuesday, September 18, Kalispell
Woodland Park was once the grounds of the Charles Conrad family. Conrad was the founder who promised James Hill a city if he brought his Northern Pacific Railroad through here. The park is a pretty hillside down to a lake, in a neighborhood that reminded us of Cleveland Park. The Conrad Mansion is open to the public, a grand Edwardian home with lots of wooden arches, stained glass, and inglenooks. Conrad’s daughter, Alicia, was a pack rat who left the 26-room house to the city crammed to the gills. The family helped preserved American bison; the buffalo we saw the day before, and were to see later on the trip, all are descendants of Conrad’s herd.
Downtown we had lunch at Wheat Montana, a chain of bakery/sandwich shops whose specialty is bread made from Montana wheat. The part of Montana we were seeing is mountainous, but the eastern three quarters are irrigated plains of grain. We started to recognize Montana generosity: portions were huge, and food typically plain but delicious. Main Street was worth shopping, with Edwardian, 1950’s Moderne, and 1970’s facades. Many buildings have fun sculptures by a local artist; we first saw the bandit on the side of a bank, and wondered at their willingness to invite trouble, but soon realized the pieces were all over the commercial district. Their domed brick Carnegie Library has become the Hockaday Museum of Art, a collection of landscapes of nearby Glacier National Park.
Lone Pine State Park gave us a great short hike around the rim of a mountain, with views into Kalispell and the Swan Range. Natural Grocers is a chain we saw across the state, it’s like a Yes! Organic Grocer at the scale of a supermarket. Less pretentious than a Whole Foods, more organized than a food co-op, a great place to pick up locally made huckleberry soap and muesli. Sykes Diner for dinner, steak, burger, and an omelette; it’s worth mentioning for dessert, white chocolate huckleberry bread pudding with huckleberry ice cream.
Wednesday, September 19, West Glacier
Pick up lunch before you get to West Glacier; we did not, and had to settle for sandwiches from one of the few open restaurants. I expected West Glacier to be like West Yellowstone, but it’s a small crossroads serving Glacier National Park, most of whose businesses were closed for the season. Glacier’s star sight is Going to the Sun Road, which crosses the Park and the Rockies. It is one of America’s most beautiful drives. We had not been sure we would be able to see it; forest fires had closed the western entrance for over a month, and the road had only opened two days prior. We were lucky to be able to enjoy it, it is spectacular. At Lake MacDonald we walked around the Lodge, and continued past areas that had been burning only a few days prior. The smell was in the air, but the clearings the fire created gave us vistas rarely seen. Almost no traffic, so we were able to pull over where we liked. At the Loop the road does a major switchback up to the Continental Divide and Logan’s Pass. The visitors center was in the clouds, but fog burned off as we continued. This is near a triple divide, where rain flows into the Atlantic via the Missouri, the Pacific via the Columbia, or the Arctic via the Saskatchewan Rivers. All looks the same from a car, but cool, and that’s why we pull into visitor centers, to learn this stuff. Just spots of glaciers remain on the peaks, but most of what you see is the product of centuries of glaciers carving mountains out into rounded basins. St. Mary’s Lake on the east side is less majestic than Lake MacDonald, but still beautiful. Driving south through the Blackfeet Indian Reservation is mainly cattle ranches with a few hawks, into East Glacier.
Because of the fires, our original lodging at Lake MacDonald was closed. One books this a year in advance; when it was pulled from service everyone jumped to get into another place nearby. The Dancing Bear Inn looked okay on paper, but when we got there it lived up to its negative Yelp reviews. We drove across the tracks to Glacier Park Lodge, where we’d planned to have dinner and where they had one vacancy for that evening. We snapped it up, and were glad to enjoy its private balcony, views of the mountains, and comfy beds. Samuel Bartlett designed the Lodge in 1900 for the Great Northern Railroad; it is famous for his use of giant trees as columns, rough logs forming walls, and twisting branches as stair rails. If you think “National Park architecture”, this is what you see. Their friendly staff went out of their way to help us; they have jigsaw puzzles and board games in the public areas where you can just stop and savor the space.
Even if we’d not been able to drive Going to the Sun, most Park drives are oriented to the east side, so I knew we’d have plenty to see. We drove back north to Two Medicine Lake and the Paradise Point hiking trail. Despite the Park Service’s “easy” rating, this was too much for Dan (he’s blaming altitude). We sent Catie ahead and hung out near the trailhead. One is supposed to sing Broadway showtunes to keep away bears; we used both Stephen Sondheim and Bananarama. Other hikers thought us crazy, but were good natured once they figured out what we were up to.
Catie treated us for my birthday to dinner in the Lodge’s Great Northern Restaurant, wonderful trout, beef medallions in a blackberry reduction, and ravioli “Christmas”, with red and green sauces.
Thursday, September 20, Helena
There are horse and cattle ranches on the plains south of Glacier. Lots of barbed wire fences on X-framed posts, magpies, mountains and mesas in the distance. Shocking to see fracking and irrigation going on side by side – where do they think the chemicals used in fracking go if not into the crops? Mel’s Diner in Augusta serves a great pork chop sandwich, also chicken soup and a mushroom burger. Catie awarded Montana a new title, “The Land without Beyonce”, after another meal eaten to the soundtrack of the 1970’s.
We had very low cultural expectations for this trip. Those were significantly elevated at the Archie Bray Foundation in the state capital, Helena. Mr. Bray inherited a brick and tile yard, and turned it into a center of ceramic art in America. Past artists in residence have included Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio; the current Resident Artist Director is Stephen Young Lee, whose collapsed Ming-style vases we saw at the Renwick. This is very low key, more production facility and school than museum. We walked across a yard strewn with castoffs by previous artists and the old tile works and through abandoned kilns. Artists welcomed us into studios we accidentally entered while looking for their two gallery spaces. Some amazing work by contemporary craftsmen, affordably on sale at the Foundation’s shop. We happily got a chicken plate, funky tall mug and an amazingly iridescent dish.
The Montana Historical Society has a good display on the history of the state from Native Americans (very good) to 1940. Oddly for a state museum, especially a state with such a tie to mining, no coverage of geology or natural resources, and sadly, no coverage of the last eighty years. For a state whose European settlement only took off after 1880 that’s half their cultural heritage. Probably less controversial to talk about cowboys, Indians, and Anaconda than about the Unabomber, oil fracking and Ted Turner tourism.
Across the street from the Historical Society is the State Capitol. Not architecturally distinguished, but with a cool copper dome, Edwardian décor and memorial to Jeanette Rankin (first woman sent to Congress, and only person to vote against both 20th Century World Wars). Highlight of the Capitol is Charlie Russell’s majestic painting “Lewis and Clarke Meeting Indians at Ross’ Hole”. We realized we had wandered into a state house with zero security: no bag check, no metal detector, just a sleepy guard who didn’t look up when I searched for a brochure. What a difference 2,000 miles makes.
A short drive brought us to the Cathedral of St. Helena, on a rise above downtown. Due to Irish, Italian, Croatian, and Polish miners, there are tons of Catholics in Montana. The Cathedral dates to 1908, and is based on the Votivkirche in Vienna. Brilliant Bavarian stained glass tells stories we rarely see, like Constantine’s mother (St. Helena, keep up here, kids) identifying sites in the Holy Land. The neighborhood around the Cathedral worth a walk, a nicely maintained neighborhood of substantial homes that are pleasant rather than grandiose. Also the first Jewish synagogue built in the state, a style I’m dubbing Montana Moorish, like a Masonic Temple built with reverence.
Catie had never eaten at a Taco John’s, so we introduced her to the wonders of their pseudo-Mexican-over-hash-browns cuisine. You haven’t eaten in the West if you haven’t had “potatoes ole”.
Friday, September 21, Butte
Interstate 15 took us back over the Continental Divide via Eagle Pass to Butte. We could barely keep up with which way the rivers were flowing; in Butte it’s the Clark Fork, which eventually finds the Missouri and Gulf of Mexico. Scarily for that watershed, the E-ticket in Butte is the Berkeley Pit. Butte was founded on top of copper ore. That copper is what electrified America, and made the city rich. Two copper barons, Marcus Daly and William Clark, competed for control of the mines, eventually consolidating into The Anaconda Copper Company. Their shaft mines undermined most of the city; Clark made sure to purchase the mineral rights before building his mansion to make sure it would not collapse into a digging. When the price of copper made shaft mining unprofitable, The Company started strip mining. Their Berkeley Pit consumed one quarter of the city, including the main Irish and Italian neighborhoods and Clark’s amusement park. Then in the 1980’s they walked away. The Company had kept groundwater under control through a pump at their Kelly Mine, but turned the power off when they left. Water did what it does, and soon the interconnected mine shafts filled with arsenic, cadmium, zinc, and sulfuric acid contaminated water. At the Pit, it formed a toxic lake where waterfowl who drink are dissolved from the inside out. The acidity is about that of lemon juice, but the metals will kill you. Frighteningly, the water is a few feet below the level where it will start entering the Clark Fork, and so the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. It’s the country’s biggest SuperFund site. $6 Gets you on a viewing platform to learn the Pit’s history, and what is being done to alleviate the problem. It is surprisingly beautiful, like a circular Grand Canyon with a deep blue lake of poison. And the sound of guns popping off at regular intervals to scare away birds.
Downhill from the Pit is Joe’s Pasty Shop. Pasties were brought to Butte by Cornish and Welsh miners, and have morphed into calzones of potatoes and beef. Flaky and delicious, get one with gravy, and expect to share. A couple of historic buildings in downtown Butte are supposed to be open as museums, the Mai Wah Chinese grocers and Dumas Brothel, but both were closed and have been for a while. The Brothel is up for auction for back taxes. Redeeming downtown, however, was the Butte Homecoming Parade, a sweet run of purple-and-white-clad students from all the teams of Butte High. Several of the football players are women, a coup for Title IX and credit to the Butte pasty. Some amazing Victorian and Art Deco store fronts, but seemingly no economy.
We walked uphill to the Arts Chateau. This was William Clark Junior’s mansion, around the corner from his Dad’s. Delano & Aldrich did the original design, but most interiors are from a 1928 redecoration by Marshall Field’s. After the Clarks the home was owned by two local politicians, then the Shriners, then the local historic association. It’s used now as a cultural center. Some mediocre paintings, the draw is the house itself. An amazing ballroom on the top floor with Pocahontas and foxhunt murals that contrast with the mining city viewed from the windows.
The World Museum of Mining is part ghost town, part mine technology. The Orphan Girl Mine was well away from most of the Butte mines (hence the name), and the Museum collected buildings from mining towns around the state to form a rough idea of a boom town in the available land. It really needs refreshing, we were not impressed. On the hour, though, a student from Montana Tech led us down into the mine. I was worried about getting down and, more importantly, getting back up, but needn’t have been. Mining students excavated a ramp from the surface into the original shaft. It’s an easy walk down and back; headlamps on our helmets provided more than enough light in the once-working tunnel. The guide was brilliant, in an hour he gave us a tour of the headworks machinery and the shaft, showed us how ore was extracted originally, and how it is done today. We were impressed by the tunneling technology, the use of compressed air, the logistics of working there, and the amount of material, people and animals that had to go into a mine in order to get ore out of it. Totally worth it. If you have the chance to go to Butte people will laugh at you, but see the Pit and the Museum of Mining and have the laugh on them.
From the Holiday Inn Express we walked across the freeway to the Hanging 5 Diner. We started taking for granted friendly service and huge portions; we had breakfast for dinner with pancakes, a chef salad, and jalapeno kielbasa.
Saturday, September 22, Bozeman
We had a choice on our drive east to Bozeman. Most folks would have gone to Lewis & Clark Caverns, a well-developed tourist stop. I was concerned, though, that it would take more time than we wanted to spend. Instead we went to the Headwaters of the Missouri State Park and National Historic Landmark. This is where Lewis and Clark decided that none of the three streams that came together here were important enough to be considered the Missouri proper. They named them the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers (after the president and secretaries of State and Treasury) and moved on. It’s a cool marshy area surrounded by mountains. We laughed at university students trying to launch a boat, watched chipmunks, and hiked the easy trail to where the already-joined Jefferson-Madison met the Gallatin. Lovely fall color, lots of fishermen and boaters, with the rivers surprisingly full for September.
Lunch was outside of Bozeman at Panda Buffet. This was surprisingly good, with several Asian families eating there, a classic Chinese buffet setup (not the Panda Café we were expecting). We were happy to get vegetables. On the Montana State campus is the Museum of the Rockies, which to my surprise was jammed. It was Smithsonian Free Museum Day. Uggh. I like my museums empty, thanks, not a competition for parking. Good for them, though, for getting the crowd. One of the best collections of dinosaurs in the world, also good geology exhibits and a Yellowstone Park-themed play space. Temporary shows of painting and photography from the Arctic just okay.
In an office park away from campus is the American Computer Museum. A suite of offices have been packed with exhibits and artifacts from the last sixty years of computers. Grace Hopper, the ENIGMA machine, NASA projects my Dad worked on. Katherine Johnson, one of the pioneers of computing who worked on the space program. Totally unexpected. Michael enjoyed getting his photo with robots from “Lost in Space” and “Forbidden Planet”.
The Bequet caramel factory was closed for the weekend, but we were able to stock up on their candy at stores in downtown Bozeman. This downtown is pretty and fun, lots of good restaurants and stores nestled in the mountains. Retail appealing to both affluent residents and tourists. An entire store devoted to honey, selling not just gourmet brands, but equipment and clothing for you to keep your own hives. Wicked.
Michael treated us for my birthday this evening, at Blacksmith Italian. Their specialty is pasta made from locally-produced wheat. Not sure we noticed the difference, but we were blown away by the quality of the food and the service. Arugula with anchovies, a caprese with fried basil, pork chop with panzanella, gnocchi, a carbonara, and an awesome salted caramel budalino (ice cream treat) for dessert.
Sunday, September 23, Yellowstone
Livingston is another affluent community east of Bozeman, service center for ranches in the Paradise Valley. Friendly folks, even at the too-posh coffee place. Their former train station, by Delano & Aldrich, is now a museum center. Too late in the season to see exhibits, but the building is great, with curved Beaux Arts wings embracing the platform. Driving south from Bozeman would have gotten us to West Yellowstone, but coming down from Livingston let us enter Yellowstone National Park at Gardiner.
Yellowstone is impressive any way you rate it. The landscape, the animal preserve, the geysers, the history. It’s bigger than Connecticut and Delaware put together, and requires planning if you’re going to see more than a drive through. I’d made us reservations over a year ago for our lodging in the Park, which is required if you don’t want to spend hours getting in every day. Navigation is easy: roads form a figure eight, but driving is not. You’re ascending mountains to approach the edge of the caldera, the volcano that forms most of the Park, then descending into it. During peak, apparently, the traffic jams are terrible, every driver as intent on sighting a moose as you are. The hot spot under Yellowstone is active, so could erupt at any time. That heat plus streams continually replenishing the groundwater give you geysers. In addition, the Yellowstone River, a major branch of the Missouri, flows through the Park from Yellowstone Lake. There are settlements along the figure eight, most with a major hotel, grocery store, gas station and visitor center, but some just trailheads with signboards at a parking area. It’s the oldest National Park in the world, and there are layers of history of tourism and conservation to explore.
We started at Mammoth, in the northwest corner of the Park. This is one of the major settlements, a former Army post, where we would be staying that night. After lunch in the restaurant and a quick orientation in the visitor center we walked through Mammoth Lower Terraces. These are a wedding-cake series of terraces, where water is forming, destroying, and recreating travertine marble regularly. There are fumaroles (slots where steam comes out of the ground), geysers (eruptions of water), and mudpots (gurgling vats of mud), all connected via a boardwalk to orient tourists and keep us from stepping on and damaging the geology. Busy, but we never had to fight a crowd to get a good view of anything. There are delicate rock tips at terrace edges, and hot water streaming over the sides making new stone. The wet stone is a million colors that when dry fade to a flaky grey. You’re sort of in a moonscape, surrounded by boiling waterfalls, jostling bus loads of Chinese and smaller groups of Europeans and Americans for photos.
Driving south took us to Norris Geyser Basin. Similar crowd, more Chinese buses, and more varied geysers, bubbling pools, fumaroles, and mud pots. A surreal feeling, especially with Asians doing glamour poses in front of hot springs that would kill them if they got too close. The boardwalk was a little steep, but led to a much-less-popular Back Basin. Similar water features, but in a pine forest. Lots of sulfurous vapors and gurgling, and more pleasant as more private. The walk was not well marked, but if you stayed on the walkway you saw lots of cool stuff and eventually got back to your car. I expect that during busier seasons it’s less confusing, as you’re forced to go with the flow of the crowd.
There was construction on the road to/from Norris, which delayed us half an hour each way. Between crowded summers and frozen winters there is a limited period the Park Service can do work, but it was still a hassle. We saw mountain goats on the road north, and were greeted by three elk munching the lawn as we checked into Mammoth cabins. Dinner in the restaurant was surprisingly good; bison burger, chicken thighs on polenta, burrata with mesclun. Not the burger and fries I was expecting, for which Catie sent a prayer to the Unitarian God of Vegetarians.
We’d reserved a cabin without a bath. Surprisingly spacious, with plenty of space for Catie to spread out her sleeping bag. Bath/shower facilities were a couple cabins away, which would have been easier if it was not raining. And we didn’t have to skip around elk scat at 1:30AM. Using cell phones as flashlights and to ward off bears. This was the first night I discovered I had a problem with altitude. We’d all been sneezing blood, and I’d had loose stools (ahem) for a couple days, but at 4AM and 6,700 feet I just could not sleep due to shortness of breath. Eh, I woke up early, sat on our porch, and watched elk frolic a few feet away. Who can argue with that?
Monday, September 24, Yellowstone
Oh, yeah. We’d left Montana, and were in Wyoming. The state border is within the Park, and you don’t notice it when you cross. Moving on …
The elk watched us pack the car and we drove east to Tower, another Park service town. Deer along the road, and a good exhibit on a small loop trail explaining the forces that created these mountains. We turned the corner on the eight and went south to Canyon, where the Yellowstone River has carved its own Grand Canyon from the terrain. We drove the North Rim Trail and stopped for views. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was painted by Thomas Moran in mural-size canvases that hang in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art; these paintings helped convince Congress to create the Park. We didn’t get Moran’s exact view, but were close. We stopped for lunch at a burger counter in Canyon Village, then headed west to Norris and the Lower Geyser Basin. We’re glad we took multiple days for this Park, there is way too much cool stuff to absorb in an afternoon. We walked the Fountain Paint Pot Trail, checked out bison, and drove south to Midway Geyser Basin and Grand Prismatic Spring. The latter had a cool overflow, not in a fall, but in a sheet of water that flowed gracefully down to the next water feature.
We arrived at Old Faithful Village just in time to see the geyser erupt, then got ice cream in the Bear Pit, the Inn’s former pub with fun animal cartoons from the 1920’s. We circled Old Faithful on the Upper Geyser Basin Trail. When we returned to check in to the Inn, the kind woman gave us one of the “Old Rooms” with a view of Old Faithful. These rooms date back to 1904, with original cast iron hardware, log walls, copper-topped furniture, and bathrooms down the hall. Rob Reardon, architect for the Northern Pacific Railway, helped create Park Service architecture here, with a massive vaulted log and stone Great Hall. Inspiring. We had a lovely dinner in the main dining room, buffalo meatballs, mac & cheese with venison sausage, spaghetti squash with a basil dressing.
At 7,300 feet, Old Faithful was our highest lodging, and the worst night for me. If I consciously breathed deeply I was fine, but as soon as I started to sleep my body reverted to normal breaths and I would waken suffocating. Not fun. I eventually made my way to the front desk to find out what other people did. The attendant was brilliant and helpful - put me on the phone with an emergency room, where the options seemed to be getting in an ambulance for Big Sky, two hours away, or soldiering through the night until the clinic across the street opened the next morning. I chose the latter, read a couple hours, and at some point did sleep for a couple hours.
Tuesday, September 25, Grand Teton
After breakfast Catie checked out the North Geyser Basin while Michael and I drove over to the Clinic. As suspected, they would not do anything until they had checked me in and run my vitals, but were able to informally offer advice and a good handout on altitude sickness. It sounds silly that I was so resistant to care, but once medical folks hear the words “diabetes” and “quadruple bypass” they stop paying attention to anything else until they can say neither of those is a problem. Which of course, it always is, so there would go three days of vacation in a hospital room until it was time to fly out. The cure for altitude sickness is to lower your altitude, which we were doing that day anyway. I thanked the staff and marched Michael out. We walked over to the Old Faithful Visitors Center, which was a great orientation spot, lots of good info on geysers and a funky relief map of the Park that helped us plan our day.
We rendezvoused with Catie, checked out, and drove east and south to West Thumb Geyser Basin. My brother Tony had suggested we concentrate on the geothermal aspects of Yellowstone, as we would be seeing lots of mountains beyond lakes on the rest of our trip. He was right, but it was too convenient to check out this geyser area, and it gave us a chance to walk on the shore of Yellowstone Lake as well. The geysers are right along the lakefront; early tourists used to catch fish in the Lake, lift their rods, and cook their catch in an adjacent geyser. Despite the fun of gurgling springs and the drama of geysers and waterfalls, my favorite features were the crystal pools that seemed to let you look into the center of the Earth.
The south entrance of Yellowstone leads to Rockefeller Parkway and along the east side of the Teton Mountain Range in Grand Teton National Park. This area was purchased, aggregated, and donated to the Park Service by the Rockefeller family, and is stunning. It lacks Yellowstone’s diversity of options, but still has the wildlife, and the mountains against the lakes are majestic. There was supposed to be an entry fee, but we missed it. Lunch at Flagg Ranch, then a drive south through the Park. There is a good visitor center at Colter Bay, with a small but choice exhibit of Indian artifacts behind the gift shop. We drove along Jackson Lake and walked on Jenny Lake, which is one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever seen. It got a little crowded, but we didn’t have to do too much jostling to get decent parking spaces and vistas. The sagebrush plains to the east of the Tetons, some of the youngest mountains in the world, are so new that they are barren, as soil hasn’t had a chance to form here. A good visitors center at Moose, with amazing views and another useful relief map.
The ski town of Jackson Hole is just south of the Park. It’s delightful and affluent, with arches of seasonally-shed elk antlers at the corners of the town square. It reminded Michael of a whole town designed by the clothing store Chico’s. Great bakery for a coffee-pastry break. Leaving town we cut west across the mountains on Teton Pass. The Tetons are the leading edge of the Pacific Plate, where it rides up over the Atlantic Plate. The east side is grey, bare, rugged mountains. To our surprise, the west side is a gradual slope, vividly green and gold with pasture. You wonder if cattle ever graze up the Idaho side to plummet over the edge into Wyoming. Excellent evidence of Continental Drift.
We cruised north, passing the Spud Drive-In in Victor (signed by a giant fake potato in a truck) into Driggs. When I’d booked the Park Service hotels for this trip, I’d gotten nervous that I could not book anything in Jackson, or Grand Teton. I suspect I was too early, and those lodgings had not yet opened rooms for the season. Travelocity, however, had shown me Teton Hostel Hideaway. I would never have booked a place like this, but it was one of the more memorable and funky stays of the trip. It’s a big ranch house, with the requisite wall of windows facing the mountains, run by a family as a hostel. They rented us two rooms, each with private bath. There are also dormitory-style hostel rooms on the lower floors. We never saw the landlord, but were greeted with instructions left out for us, and by the owner’s massive Great Dane, Dirk. And turtles. And an iguana. And massive photo-murals of Mormon Jesus. The owner has hoarding tendencies, but nothing that got in the way of our enjoying our large bedrooms. Other guests helped us find the laundry and we all worked together to figure out the kitchen appliances.
Driggs gets spillover from the more affluent Jackson Hole side of the Tetons. We walked into Forage, a restaurant downtown, and expected to just grab a table. This was a classier place than that, but with Idaho friendliness they gave us their last open table for one of the best meals of our trip. Drunken brie, a Teton Valley cider, chicken piccata, ricotta balls, and a broccoli slaw. Delicious, and unpretentious.
Wednesday, September 26, Butte
A friendly breakfast chatting up hostel guests, some from Europe, others from across the States. Teton Scenic Byway took us north in Idaho to Mesa Falls, a pair (Upper and Lower) of waterfalls on the Henrys Fork River. Lovely, especially with the aspens changing color for the autumn. Back into Montana and over to West Yellowstone. We got plate lunch at Chinatown Café.
If Catie had not been with us, we would never have bothered with the Grizzly & Wolf Recovery Center. She loves animals, and had put up with our dragging her through mansions around the Rockies, so why not. This place rocks. They’re a hospital for bears, wolves, and raptors. Animals who cannot be released are comfortably housed here. They use the grizzlies to test out bear-proof storage for manufacturers; it was fun watching bears breaking into a variety of coolers. The wolves were sleeping, but the raptors were as good as the ones we saw in Eugene, Oregon. Staff friendly and informative; I got chatty with a woman setting up to let kids hide food around the bear enclosure. They did a great job explaining why wolf reintroduction was important to the Park: the wolf-free Park had way too many elk, aspen and willow forests, and coyotes. The reintroduced Park has more wide-open landscapes and a healthier spread of animals.
Virginia City is heralded as a living ghost town. Maybe it was end of season, but it just looked tired to us. Lots of original buildings, many interpreted as museum spaces, all needing a good dusting. Few of the shops and none of the restaurants were open, although there was a helpful guide/interpreter in the City Hall space. North and west passing cattle and llama ranches, and fields of what we assume were winter wheat and hay. Back into the mountains to Butte.
Why a return to Butte? The state is thinly enough settled that there just were not enough places that could support hotels on our route without doubling up here. The Copper King Mansion, however, exceeded all expectations. The copper king was William Clark. In addition to this estate he had homes on Fifth Avenue, in Paris, and Santa Barbara. He helped found Las Vegas, was a developer of Chevy Chase, and gave his art collection and a major addition to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. His home in Butte was bought by an antiques collector, who refurnished the house after a convent had passed through. We were greeted by that woman’s great-granddaughter Maria, who works at Delta as well as helping her parents run the B&B. She is great, showing us around and making sure we understood how to operate the bathroom (funky needle shower from 1900) before leaving us to enjoy the mansion. It was amazing, like having temporary ownership of a house museum, with none of the responsibility.
Uptown Café on Main Street served me a meal “Meaderville style”. Meaderville was the Italian neighborhood that disappeared into the Berkeley Pit; its restaurants introduced Butte to meals in courses like my grandmother made. I got a meatball soup, stuffed clams, salad, bread, and coquilles St. Jacques, with a chocolate and pecan-coated ice cream ball for dessert. Michael and Catie helped eat it all, along with their vegetarian pasta and chicken tarragon.
Thursday, September 27, Anaconda
I wandered downstairs for breakfast, where Maria was making coffee and conversation with Catie in the kitchen. When she had a quorum she moved us to the dining room, and served a multi-course breakfast of fruit, chocolate chip pancakes, bacon and eggs. Fantastic. She had to get us out and the rooms prepped for the 10AM tour, so we packed and took a walk to the Silver Bow County Courthouse. A Beaux Arts building with stunning stained-glass dome surrounded by frescoes representing Philosophy, Geography, and Justice as bar girls from 1890. Then back to the house for the tour that came with our stay, led by the sexually ambiguous TJ. They knew their material, and gave a great walk through the public spaces, the rooms we’d slept in, and the third-floor ballroom. Maria’s family collected items from the history of Butte as buildings collapsed into the Pit; it was mind blowing that this was all in private hands. And we’d spent the night with it.
We drove west to Anaconda. Butte had the ore, but not enough water to smelt that ore into salable copper. Marcus Daly created the town of Anaconda to make that happen. It has one of the tallest smoke stacks in the world. The draw for us was the Phoebe Appleton Hearst Free Library (William Randolph Hearst was an investor in the Anaconda). The building is their best asset, an arched orange brick Italian palazzo with multiple floors of reading rooms. Tourist info stressed the art Mrs. Hearst donated to the library, but it’s either been sold off or she gave the dregs of the Hearst collection. Lunch at Peppermint Patty’s diner was our last classic Montana meal, a chef salad, grilled cheese, fried corn (like a cross between a corn fritter and a McNugget), and a ripper dog: a hot dog that had been scored and fried so it formed a halo that fit on a hamburger bun.
We drove to Missoula and wandered a bit around the University of Montana campus. But honestly, we were tired: we pulled into the Holiday Inn Express, unpacked everything from the car, and Catie and I packed while Michael returned our rental.
Friday, September 28, Missoula Airport
A 5:40 AM flight out of Missoula: what was I thinking? The airport opened at 4AM, and the nice Holiday Inn shuttle driver got us there on the dot. We’d never opened Security before, but it was fun to go through with fresh, friendly TSA agents and no lines. Delta got us back to Minneapolis and National, where we discovered our bags had arrived ahead of us.
We need to make a shout out to the people of Montana: they were welcoming, knowledgeable, and friendly. They have pride in their cities and state without arrogance. It is a very white state; we were all aware when Michael was not the only minority in a room, but it was never uncomfortable. The state’s economy is varied, with lots of places doing really well, and some struggling with past choices. The parks, both state and national, offer scenery and experiences that we have seen nowhere else, and are up front about any problems you might encounter (fires, washed-out paths, bears, planet-destroying volcanic eruption).
Two things we did not explore: There are tons of “casinos”, most of which looked tawdry and none of which appealed. Some of them seemed to be mere gas stations with a couple slot machines. This also seems to be a culture where people hang out in bars as the primary social space. I’d read about this, that we should just stop into a bar to meet people, but we never did.
Overall, Montana was one of our great explorations. We give it three thumbs up.
* Still on the roster: Alaska, Hawaii, and North Dakota. We’re not too worried if we never make it to the latter.
