Some of the Sights of Butte

I think I mentioned a while back that we took a little family trip to Butte on afternoon about a month ago. We took a few random pictures while we toured the sights of the old town, and it was kind of fun! Here are some of the things we saw...

This is the old M&M cafe. I guess it's been open 24 hours pretty much ever since the mining town was big. It's been around since 1890, and is a pretty good place to visit if you want a taste of Butte culture, or so we're told.

While there are lots of beautiful old brick buildings in Butte (it is very different from most Montana towns in that way), I'm not sure the sights we saw led us to believe there is that much culture left in the Copper City. Here is some of what we saw...

Remnants of the old mining town still looming...

Old businesses that look like they just stopped being (this is a law office, in case you can't read the sign above the door....)



And a church-turned-movie-theater. I can't say that I've ever seen this one before. I've seen plenty of grocery-stores-turned-church-building, but this I just stopped and gawked at for a while.

But there were some other cool sights about the town, too, and lots of old buildings that were fun to look at...

We wanted to take Ellie to go see the Berkley Pit, but it was closed for the season. We also wanted to go tour Our Lady of the Rockies, but I think it was closed because it was Sunday. The restaurant we were originally going to eat at was closed because it was Sunday, too. I think next time we will have to go on a weekday or a Saturday. Still, it was a pretty good afternoon. Pretty good indeed.

Christmas in Roundup

We went to Roundup to have an early Christmas on the 21st. It was good to spend time with family and Eliana had a great time playing with some of her new gifts! Thanks Grammee and Grandad and Grandpa and Gayle and Eric for accommodating our schedule and celebrating early with us this year!

Weekend Getaway: Part II

Now that another week has come and gone, I suppose I should post another segment from our weekend getaway.

After leaving Yellowstone we stayed the night in Cooke City. When we awoke in the morning we were able to see a little more of our surroundings:

We also discovered a cute little black cat that wandered into our room every time we opened the door. He just came in and made himself right at home! Very friendly, but we kept putting him back out nonetheless. After we checked out of our room we decided to check out the town of Cooke City. There's not much there other than hotels, bars, and a few coffee shops. This is about it:

We did stop at this little coffee shop, though, and decided that they have really good caramel mochas. That's a good way to start off any day.

We drove up the Beartooth Pass. It was fairly strange to be in the middle of June and find so much snow around. There were plenty of other people that were enjoying it, though.

The weirdest part had to be driving through snow drifts on both sides of the road that were taller than our car:

Unfortunately, as we neared the top of the pass we learned that the road was not completely open due to snow, so we had to turn around and take another way. We drove through some beautiful scenery along the way, though, and I'm glad we went that way. The rock formations were very cool and there were some crazy sharp mountain peaks. You could definitely see that it was a glacially formed area and, as I said, it was beautiful to drive through.

As we rounded a corner on this twisty, curvy road, we came to a bridge and saw that it crossed a gorge. Not just a little gorge, either, but a really deep one, with rock cliff walls and a tiny river (at least tiny from where we were!) at the bottom. We stopped there and got out for a bit to look around, but the pictures we took could in no way do justice to the sight. It was amazing. You can sort of see the gorge running up the center of this picture (though not the bridge):

And here you can see the gorge drop off under the bridge, but you can't even see halfway down the rock cliffs. It was deep! (And yes, for those concerned, there was a giant fence to keep people from falling down and we did stay on our side of it. =D )

Along the way, we saw a few not-so-natural spectacles, too. We drove through a lot of podunk MT on this trip, including the town of Edelweiss (population 3)...

and a quick drive through the town of Belfry (yes, their school mascot is the Bats... because they apparently have bats in the belfry)...

(But really... would you want to walk under this creepy looking sculpture every time you went to school? Me either.)

And as we joined up with the highway on our way to Billings, we stumbled out of nowhere land and into... a ferris wheel? Oh, and a giant cowboy with a rifle. I felt like I was on Route 66.

And though we were a couple hours late due to the Beartooth Pass being closed, we eventually made it to Billings for Father's Day with Leif's family. But that is part III of our Weekend Getaway, so you'll have to wait for that story a bit later. (Though hopefully not as long as you had to wait for part II! I'm hoping to get it up later today if I can!)

Yellowstone in Winter

One of the best things about living here is that we can drive down to Yellowstone for the day, just because we want to. And yesterday, we wanted to. So we climbed into the car and drove the hour and a half or so to the northern entrance to Yellowstone at Gardiner.

Because it's winter, most of the roads in the park are closed to automobiles. But the northern entrance is still open, and there are a couple roads you can still take, at least for a little ways. We don't often head into the park via Gardiner, but it's fun when we do because we get to see the arch.

A little piece of trivia for you... Yellowstone was the first National Park, established in 1872. March 1st, in fact. If you don't believe me, read the sign...

On the way into the park, we were fortunate enough to see 3 bald eagles perched in a tree overlooking a river. They were incredibly majestic, sitting there against the backdrop of the mountains.

Once we were into the park, we made our way through the little town of Mammoth Hot Springs. I think the name should be changed to Elkville, though, because every time we are there we see tons of elk. They seem to think they own the place, and they can apparently read signs and know just where it is that they are supposed to plop down:

As is typical of any trip to the park, we spent most of the day in the car. The winter sun spent most of the day in our eyes. To make Ellie's life a little easier on the long car ride, we let her watch Baby Einstein and covered the seat with a blanket to keep the sun out of her eyes. She is much like her daddy and likes to be in a dark cave...

Winter has got to be the best time to visit Yellowstone. It's definitely the off-season, so there aren't too many people around. The views are spectacular in the cold, clear air, and everything is pristine all covered in snow. It is beautiful.

We decided to get out of the car and go for a little walk about mid-afternoon. So we put on all our snow gear (after our little trek up at Hyalite I was prepared for thigh deep snow this time!!) and headed out along someone else's trail in the snow. As usual, Ellie didn't want to walk in the snow, but she did give it a good try a couple of times, despite being cold.

The snow was mostly packed down, but every so often your foot would fall through and you'd find your leg lost in the snow up to the hip. You can only see one of my legs in the following picture, because the other is covered in snow. In fact, I am standing straight up on that leg, despite the fact that it looks like I am sitting in the snow. As you can imagine, it wasn't a very long walk.

We have been to Yellowstone a number of times, but one thing I have never seen in the park is wolves. They were reintroduced in 1995 and have reportedly been doing very well, but they like to stay out of sight. But while we were out on our little walk, we had the privilege of seeing 4 wolves harassing a few grazing bison. They were beautiful to watch and I was pretty excited to see them this close up. We saw a couple others, too, but they were much farther off.

We were fortunate enough to see another animal that we've never seen inside the park, too: big horn sheep. That's another reason to visit Yellowstone in the winter... all the animals come out to graze. The park is so serene and there seems to be a greater variety of wildlife to be seen. Here are the sheep, searching for a little something to eat:

As the sun started to dip below the horizon, we saw a bull elk grazing by the side of the road. We stopped to admire and in the quiet of the evening we heard the sound of owls hooting in the forest. It is a sound I'd never heard in the wild before and it was ethereal. The hooting echoed through the trees and made me stop and listen in wonder. It was amazing.

We started back home and enjoyed the setting sun over the snowy landscape and it made us both thankful that we live in such a beautiful place.