Saturday, July 20, 2024
Mining Museum
Our final day in Butte, we had two things on our agenda. When I was looking through the literature this morning, I found a Holy Trinity Serbian Orthodox Church with "hand-painted frescos visually depicting scripture." I thought we probably should check that out, but reservations were required. The door was locked, so I just got a picture of the outside, and the painting above the door, which I thought might be a fresco painting.
Next we were off to the World Museum of Mining. This took us right back up to the area we went through on the trolley. We had to detour around a street fair. We found our way back to the route and continued on. At the end of the street was Montana Tech, and we had to circle the campus to get to the Museum because that road was also closed, for road construction this time. It was a nice-looking campus, but we don't really know much about it.
We did find our way to the Museum and went into the ticket office/gift shop area and checked it out. Ultimately, Joe decided it was probably too much walking for me so we didn’t do the tour.
It was about 22 acres, all outside, and we had seen mines before. Joe was able to drive around the backside of the building so we were able to see most of what we could have walked through. He didn't see any huge machinery, just "junk" he said.
And then, of course, he just continued on these back roads through the hills. I'm sure we had mine tunnels beneath us the whole time.
We made our way back to old town and Joe found the street fair somehow. I had given up on finding it. It actually was a Farmers Market about a block long. It’s hours were 8:00-1:00 and it was probably 12:15 when we got there. We did walk it (mistake, my leg killed me the rest of the day), but didn’t buy anything. That was all the walking I had in me. I have something going on with my left calf that I don’t know what it is, but it’s painful to walk on. An Urgent Care next week when we’re in Bozeman might be on the agenda. I've had this for about 10 days, and I don't know what caused it.
They had baked goods and interesting craft items. Most of the baked goods were already gone.
We went back to our Pizza Ranch for lunch and to rest my aching leg, then Joe decided to look for a road to drive. We really hadn’t been south of town so he found Basin Creek Road which took us out past the cemetery and the airport, and then turned southwest.
We have seen a few of these "wrapped" electric boxes here in Butte, like what we saw in Helena.
A new forest fire started southeast of town yesterday. I think so far it’s burned 150 acres but we could see the black smoke boiling off of it and planes and helicopters fighting it.
As we drove along, we spotted some animals out in a field. We first thought they were cattle, then horses, and then we decided they were elk. He found a place to pull off so we could get out the binoculars, and there was probably 60 to 70 cow elk out there grazing, we never did see a bull. We finally drove on until our road dead- ended into a park with a lake somewhere behind it, but we could not see the water -- there was a gate.
We turned around and headed back. We had passed another side road, Herman Gulch Road. It started out as blacktop and took us past some houses, but then it turned into dirt. We continued on for a mile or so, but it was getting pretty rough and we didn’t want to get beat up again today, so we turned around and headed back to the highway. One side of the road was the gulch with a strip of recently mowed hay, but the other side of the road was hilly with huge boulders. We think they’re granite but we don’t know that for sure.
We got back to our elk look-out, but they had wandered further away from the road. We were hoping they were grazing closer to the road. We could still see them, but not very well.
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We took our highway back to the edge of town and picked up Highway 2. We took it down a few miles and then turned north on Continental Drive. To the right of us is Blacktail Mountain where the fire is. From here (and almost anywhere), we could see the "Lady" statue at the top of the mountain.
This road brought us back to the interstate and we headed home. As soon as we turned onto the interstate, we saw a bunch of emergency vehicles pulled off on the other side. As we went past, we could see motorcycles parked on both sides of the road. We wondered if perhaps there was one over the embankment, but we couldn’t see anything. It must have just happened because we met two vehicles with flashing lights just down the road.
We spent the rest of the day in the RV. We feel like we have seen all we need to see around Butte and are ready to move on. And get the A/C fixed!!!
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