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7/16
Gary went fishing. I went lazy. He had a great day….not so much with the fish, but had some great moments with Rocky Mountain sheep. Fished Rock Creek with mixed results but while driving to a couple different spots along the river, he had to share the road with a mom & her twins. He saw them way ahead of time, slowed way down to a crawl and had eye contact with mom as he drove slowly by. Later, again on the move, he sees a group of about 12 ewes in the road, pretended he was British & drove on the left side of the road, as they were NOT giving up their side. He idled by & they just stared that ‘I know something you don’t’ look. He was frustrated that he didn’t have the camera with him. He did have the cell phone, but we are not used to thinking about its picture taking feature. Meanwhile, I did some paperwork, but mostly read & walked the campground. Saw a newspaper article regarding a ghost town 50 miles from here. We made plans to visit it tomorrow.
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What thought do horses share as they stand motionless looking at one another? If we had a rear window in the coach, this is what we’d be seeing. Very peaceful.
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Our space at Jim & Mary’s RV Park. The shade keeps it pretty cool here.
Below, just one of the whimsical flower beds throughout the park. This one is across from our site. Purple petunias bloom from the wheelbarrow standing on its side. All their flowers begin in their greenhouse.
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The rapidly browning hillsides under a bright Montana sky.
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Returning to the Park when we did gave us another evening’s entertainment by LeGrande Harvey & Rod Brod. It was ever so nice!
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7/17
On a nice sunny morning we packed a picnic lunch & set out for Garnet ghost town. It was the site of gold mining and it started up & was abandoned on 3 occasions from 1895 into the ‘30’s. It had a couple of hold out residents, including a bar, until the 60’s and they prevented most looters & thieves from completely stripping the town of possessions that had been left behind and building materials. It is 50 miles from here, the last few miles being a decent gravel road. The altitude is about 6,000 feet. Under the auspices of the BLM & Garnet Preservation Society (volunteers) this deteriorating group of buildings has been rescued from the brink of extinction. The volunteers started about 30+ years ago, the BLM came into it later. The buildings are being shored up and, using original lumber, are put back together. Their aim is to have the buildings kept in an upright position but are not restoring them to original condition. They have made a number of the businesses & miner’s cabins safe for walking through. The peeling wallpaper, unrestored furniture and other artifacts that have been donated all lend to the atmosphere of a recent discovery of an old mining ghost town that was abandoned with a lot of the contents left behind. Kinda neat. There are park rangers here year round and a few of the cabins have been restored for them to live in & they rent cabins to snowmobilers, obviously in the winter. No summer rentals. We enjoyed a picnic lunch in the forest. The Blackfoot River provided Gary with a nice fishing outing on our way back to Missoula. He caught a cutthroat trout and had several fish interested enough to nibble in what he was flinging onto the river’s surface. We returned to Jim & Mary’s in time to listen to a couple from Tucson who are retired from the University of Arizona and spend the summer traveling & sharing their wonderful accordion show. They were a lot of fun. He had a hat for just about every song & had us laughing. Very talented and have lovely instruments. They spent some time answering questions about their accordions. They also had a beautiful Country Coach motorhome. Pretty neat to have entertainment AND ice cream 2 nights running.
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This little butterfly landed and found something about the knothole that kept it there for awhile. This knothole was on one of the weather-beaten buildings at Garnet.
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One of the only homes at Garnet that was not a log cabin. This was an upright plank-sided Victorian style home. It had about fallen down and you can see the shoring up & reinforcing with 2X4’s that has been done. The floor is gone and, in the picture below, you can see how the lower part of the wall has been eaten away by weather & time. We don’t know if this is a work in progress or all they will do with this one. It does have a new roof to protect it from further weather damage.
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An overview of Garnet. The buildings in the foreground comprised the business district and the buildings going up the hillside were the miner’s cabins. These have been rescued and you can walk freely within the walls. The tall dark building seen in a side view/center was the 2 story hotel which was the fanciest building in town. For the struggling miners there was the attic with marked floor spaces for them to rent & spread their bedrolls.
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Another overview. The orange netting is fencing off an area that is being salvaged. We saw them using a small crane to move a small outbuilding into place. The green roof in the foreground is one of the restored buildings used to house rangers.
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The parking for visiting the ghost town of Garnet is uphill from the site. Next to it is the path down to the town. Near the parking lot are picnic tables, which we took advantage of. No, the cooler does not contain the world’s biggest lunch for 2.
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Sand Park Cemetery, located between Garnet & Coloma, holds 5 gravesites of miners, whose names & date of death are noted on the tombstones. In the years of the 2 towns being active, other miners died, but had families to dictate where the bodies should go. These 5 had no one. And no one has been able to track down anything about these men in spite of efforts to do so.
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Well, this was my personal thrill for the day! Nothing like a wide load flatbed on a semi coming at you with some speed with dust flying and the road narrowing. The side of the road looks pretty innocent, but there was a ditch we’d have had a hard time with, had we had to give the truck one more inch of room. I never realized how therapeutic it is to take pictures while facing possible disaster. Keeps one from screaming.
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Pretty young girls, handsome young man, rafting in a bright pink raft with one guy on an inner-tube catching the ride down the river with them. Does this spell hot summer afternoon? Rafting the Blackfoot River outside of Missoula.
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Gary fishing the same river. Hard to say who is having more fun. I’d put my money on the man standing at river’s edge.
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This was the very entertaining couple with the accordions I described above. Now, look carefully, as this is a spliced picture. She is actually a 5’2” person and he, about 5’8”. All our pics had both of them in them. One of them was always in motion blurring our efforts. We got one shot clear of each, so Gary just stitched them together.
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