Philipsburg, Storm Lake and Rainbow Mountain

   

Wednesday, July 27,2011

Yesterday Matt, Lucy, Tommy and I took a road trip over to Philipsburg. It’s a small little town about 60 miles from here. The trip to get there was stunning. Cascading mountains with extraordinary scenery.

Once in town and parked, we walked the Main street. There were 4 other tourist couples walking along the same street and we passed them several times. I sincerely do not know how these little towns survive financially because we, along with the other couples were the only ones around.

The town consists of tiny shops that offer charming little souvenirs. There are flowers far and wide. Magnificent  flowers everywhere. We went by the Police Station and the Courthouse, the Volunteer Fire Station and within an hour and a ½, we were done. We’ve seen all they had to offer.

Storm Lake with Rainbow Mountain

wild flowers, everywhere!

On the way back we stopped at Storm Lake. Beautiful does not describe it.  We drove most of the way but the road was washed out ,due to snow melt, so we had to pull over and hike a while. Once hitting the lake we were in awe. It was better than a st. Ives Christmas card. It was astounding. We were approximately 9k feet high and it was remarkable.

can you see the bee I caught in flight?

Today, Tommy and I took out ‘little red’ and toured the up town of Butte on our own. We drove anywhere and everywhere.

We ended up at a memorial for miners on top of a hill overlooking the town. There was a flag placed for every person lost in the fire on behalf of their county. Butte has a lot of immigrants. As of today, though, they are predominately Irish.

The memorial possesses   a huge black audio box with different people telling their stories of what happened that dreadful day. One of the speakers was of a lone survivor. He is currently 96 and still lives here in Butte.

The memorial is enormously moving and we spent almost an hour there. Tommy sat on a wall on one side of the monument and I on the other, just listening to the loud speakers of the trial and tribulations of the minors and what their families had endured. To this day, it is the largest catastrophe in the history of mining.

Butte still mines for copper to this day, but it is not nearly as productive as back in the early 1900’s. There are over 10k miles, yes 12,000 miles of horizontal mines and 3500 of vertical mines here in Butte alone. In effect, the town could, theoretically, collapse.

We have 2 more days here to explore, then on Sunday we will head up to Helena - pronounced HELEN-A, which is the capital of WY.

Thanks for reading and have great weekend.