Smoking is bad for you...

On the way to Helena, a great view of the valley and the town.

Smoking is bad for you …and other tips from our trip to Washington State

A few of our loyal readers have asked if we will be posting blog updates for our summer 2019 trip (you two know who you are.) So, since Dave has basically been driving the 3,800+ miles to this point, I thought I’d try to catch you up. I’ve always considered myself the family editor and can’t hold a candle to Dave’s writing. But here goes… 

On this post, I’ll recount our 11-day trip getting to Washington. The next one will catch you up on our first week in our destination state.

On our route north, we managed to check off a few National Park sites, including Ft. Larned and Nicodemus in Kansas, the Nez Perce, Big Hole Battleground and Grant Kohrs National Historic Sites in Montana, and the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area that encompasses part of Wyoming and Montana.

The cattle drive

Our first – and only night – in Texas on this trip was spent in Copper Breaks State Park. You’ll find as we weave our way to Washington State what a prescient name that was.

Life is tough for Betsy on the Canadian River.

Our path north followed the “Lonesome Dove” trail that Woodrow and Gus took in their famous, fictional cattle drive chronicled by Larry McMurtry in the 80s. We started a bit north of their original jumping-off place on the Mexican border, but tracked the trail across the Brazos and Canadian Rivers before getting to Dodge City, KS and North Platte, NE. Although we were tracking the interstate system at this point in Nebraska, the employee at the lone staffed visitor center we found was unable to point out where Clara and Bob’s ranch near Ogallala was. What a disappointment.

A typical unmanned visitor center on our way north.

Our time in Kansas was limited, but included visits to the Fort Larned and Nicodemus historic NPS sites. 

 

 

We learned about Nicodemus from a descendant of a group of Reconstruction-era African Americans to be conned by a white developer who led them to believe they could leave Kentucky to start their own community in the Eden of Kansas. It turned out to be less bountiful and harder than they imagined, but a few remain.

We then worked our way to Wyoming, checking out a pour-your-own brewery in Cheyenne (what could go wrong?) before heading to our first multi-night stop in Sheridan.  

Held up in Sheridan!

Our goal from Sheridan was to unhitch the trailer and go over a pass into the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area. These NRAs are typically boater-heavy dammed-up lakes and aren’t typically our favorite stops. But since many are managed by the NPS, they are on our “to-visit” lists.

This drive was especially exciting, since we drove up a pass, leaving the mild weather in Sheridan to top out in snow and ice (and moose!), and then descending to chilly weather at the lake. 

Not a reassuring sign if you’re hauling a trailer (which we weren't)!

A beautiful view at the top of the pass looking into the Thermopolis valley in Wyoming.

Wyoming tourists.

Wyoming moose

The park is a dammed-up Bighorn River that meanders 71 miles between Montana and Wyoming, including a section in the Crow reservation (the Yellowtail dam is named after the Crow chief, a designation we’ll see again on our trip.) After a quick lunch at Horseshoe Point, we headed back to Sheridan to the local brewery, which was buzzing with locals celebrating the “re-launch” of the Sheridan golden ale beer. Their IPA was fantastic, and we were able to dance to a tune or two from the country western band, whose members were older than us but played great classics. From there we sampled a local restaurant, joined at the next table by a biker group from Norway. 

Our lunchtime view of Horseshoe Bend at Bighorn Canyon. The brown color is due to glacial sediment runoff.

Then it was on to Montana. After a brief stop in Billings to bike a forgettable industrial paved trail along the Yellowstone River and re-visit the breweries we discovered in 2011, we pointed the trailer to Butte, where Dave had planned our longest stayover so far. 

A confusing sign off the Yellowstone River bike path in Bilings.

Not a “Butte-e-full” story

Butte isn’t necessarily the most inviting place in Montana, but it has its own fascinating history based on copper mining (see the connection to our first night’s stop in Copper Canyon?). In fact, as we drove up the highway, we got a dose of its history listening to a Wyoming Public Radio podcast called “Richest Hill.” 

One of Butte’s top attractions, according to Trip Advisor, is the infamous Berkley Pit. It’s a mile-wide, 900-foot-deep toxic stew of water filling up the old open copper pit that literally swallowed half of the town when built in 1955. It also killed thousands of migrating geese who had the ill fortune to land on the contaminated water in 2016. To make matters even worse, the geese did not die on the water. Rather, they took off and hundreds dropped from the sky all over Butte and surrounding areas. The skies were, literally, raining dead geese. It definitely got a lot of folks attention and they now go to extraordinary lengths to scare off any birds tempted to land on the waters of the Berkeley Pit (using a variety of sound cannons).

Butte’s history is broad and dramatic, but here’s a (somewhat) condensed version.

The infamous Berkeley Pit in Butte. The turquoise color is thanks to the toxic chemicals in the water.

 

Only Butte would be bold enough to charge admission to view a chemical-laced lake.

In the 1850’s some prospectors thought they found gold in Butte but soon realized there was much less than initially believed. In the process, they found copper, but at the time it wasn’t a lucrative mineral.

Multiple headframes dot the Butte landscape still. These contraptions, which once dropped down and hauled up men and minerals through a pulley system, are now lit up in red at night.

However, the advent of electricity and communications in the 1880s made copper a necessary commodity, and made Butte a boomtown, as hundreds of copper mines and their adjacent “headframes” popped up around the hill. The ore was mined and then smelted in town, which killed all living grasses and trees, and created a thick murky smog. The trolley driver on our historic tour (who was also featured in the podcast) recounted how there was nothing green in the town when he was growing up in the 50s.

After many complaints in the early 1900s, the primary company Anaconda built a smelter 26 miles north in the aptly named town of Anaconda to alleviate the pollution. This helped some, but then angered the nearby ranchers – including Grant Kohrs of the NPS site we visited – who found their stock was eating grass laced with arsenic from the smoke. 

Anaconda’s response was to build an even bigger 585-foot smokestack in 1918, which is taller than the Washington Monument. 

The 585-foot Anaconda smelter smokestack on the right is taller than the Washington Monument. Locals say the pile of black slag on the left is not dangerous. Right.

In the early 20^th century, workers flocked to Butte from all over the world to work in the mines, building ethnic neighborhoods in town. In 1955, the mine owners decided an open pit mine would be much more productive and bought up a large swath of Butte to (largely supportive) citizens who saw the benefits of keeping their jobs. 

Anaconda had a few good decades. However, after multiple worker strikes, the drop in the price of copper, and more affordable mining discovered in Chile, what was left of the company was bought in 1977 by poor Atlantic Richfield (ARCO), who has been saddled with the extensive cost of remediation of the area ever since. On Earth Day in 1982 the Berkley Pit was closed, and the water that was flooding the abandoned mines made their way into it.

Butte is now the largest Superfund site in the country, and millions are being poured into hauling away the toxic dirt, covering the once-contaminated ground with lime, topsoil, and native plants and grasses, resulting in many beautiful hike and bike trails in the area. 

You can get a sense of the scale of this decades-long effort by reading the local weekly newspaper, where 90% of the news is related to superfund and remediation stories, while the rest was other local activities, like the recent “Pasty Throwdown.” (Pasties, as we discovered in Michigan years ago, are meat pies favored by the miners for lunch.)

At a memorial to the 166 miners who died in a fire in 1917, we talked with a local who started his career underground. He said he was young and the money was good, and seemed sad the business had left the area. We couldn’t help but compare this boom/bust cycle to the current fracking business in our home state. 

 

This memorial near the top of the Richest Hill in Butte is dedicated to 166 miners killed in 1917 in the Spectacular Mine fire, the largest loss of life in a hard rock mine.

Also, thanks to the podcast, we knew that not only was daredevil Evel Knievel interred in the local cemetery, there was also a grave for United Workers of the World organizer Frank Little, who was allegedly murdered in 1917 by goons hired by Anaconda to stop his union activities. Note in the pictures that Evel (who our trolley driver knew and said was a trouble-maker all his life) is buried in the well-manicured trust section of the cemetery, while poor Frank’s grave is in the non-maintained section. His is a popular stop for pro-union miners, who have left an assortment of memorials on the slain leader’s tombstone.

In Butte’s Mountain View cemetery, daredevil Evel Knievel has a much nicer resting place than murdered union activist Frank Little.

Other discoveries in Butte were the mansion of William Clark, one of the three “Copper Kings” in the boom times (and where we met the owner, another featured guest on the podcast), and a fantastic pork tenderloin sandwich at a local dive.

John’s Pork Chop sandwich, accompanied by tasty fries and a white sauce, ranks pretty high up there for best lunch in Butte.

At night the view of town from our RV park was bracketed by a large “M” for Montana School of Mines) carved into a bluff on the left, and an illuminated 90-foot tall “Lady of the Rockies” statue staring down on us from the right. 

 

Dusk in Butte. If you look closely you can see the illuminated “M” on the bluff to the left, and multiple red-lit headframes going up the “Richest Hill.” The "Lady of the Rockies" is out of this frame on the right.

Our side trips included the visit to the Grant Kohrs National Historic Site in nearby Deer Lodge, one of the first open range ranches and where the NPS still operates a working ranch. [picture] We also toured the Big Hole Battlefield NPS site where in 1877 U.S. soldiers tracked and then murdered hundreds of Nez Perce Native Americans – mostly women and children – as they tried to retreat to Canada. They were forced to leave after the U.S. shrank their territory by 90% from a previous treaty after gold was discovered in their reservation. 

Finally, we paid homage to the state capitol in Helena before packing up for Spokane and our first night in Washington. 

Jeanette Rankin is honored in the Montana capitol as the first female member of Congress, thanks to the state’s passing of suffrage laws (before the 1920 national ratification.)

In a few days we’ll catch you up on our Washington adventures.