Saturday, May 23, 2020

August 2017: Epic "Roadtrip" Part IV: Total Eclipse of the Sun!

Don't worry, I have a really good picture of the eclipse

As I explained in part I, this wasn't a traditional roadtrip for us.  We slept in our own bed every night.  However, some of our family members roadtripped from Seattle to experience the total eclipse of the sun.  None of us had ever witnessed a total eclipse like this.  I have seen the moon eclipsed several times.  It's cool, but not total eclipse of the sun cool.

Our house was directly in the path of totality for the eclipse.  None of us knew just how cool or how uncool it would be.  The Hot Chick's sister and her family were planning to come and stay with us and we shamed her brother into coming down with his family.  His business is a summer business, outside, landscaping.  There isn't much time for summer fun.  His kids had never been to Yellowstone or the surrounding areas, so we worked on him and worked on him and he figured out how to come on a vacation with his family.  The calendar worked out just right.  He had to juggle a few clients, but we got him and his family here.  They were glad they came.

We visited Yellowstone and Grand Teton, Lewis & Clark Caverns and the ruins of the Teton Dam.  We know how to pack a lot of stuff into a little amount of time.  News outlets were predicting about 100,000 people to descend upon our little town of 20,000.  We live near the freeway, and we stocked up on food before the big surge hit so we really never saw the crowds.  We heard about them.  People were renting rooms of their homes, backyards for tents, and even potato fields for camping.  We spent most of that time out of town being tourists other places.  We never really saw all the people that were supposedly here.  For our part, we had nine extra bodies staying in our house.  It didn't feel all that crowded because the seven kids slept in tents in the backyard.  August, Idaho, tents outside, good.

In 2012, we went up to Seattle for The Hot Chick's 30th high school reunion.  We stayed with her brother and his family that I mentioned above.  His daughters really loved Aunt Hot Chick and I took this picture then


Auntie Hot Chick and the nieces.  Sounds like a good name for a chick band

I loved that picture, so we decided to recreate it on eclipse day.  Here it is.

Recreating the photo, a few years later.

The news showed store shelves empty of eggs and milk and other important things.  Surprisingly there was plenty of toilet paper.  Her brother asked if we needed him to bring us any food or milk as he had seen those newscasts about southeast Idaho clear up in Seattle.  We were fine and we told him so.  In fact, we never really saw any shortages.  Maybe we just knew where to shop.

Since this week was all about family, I'll show a bit of that stuff, mainly for the family members who were here during the eclipse, then I'll get to the eclipse because that is what you are reading this for.  One of the nephews was celebrating a birthday.  He said it was the best birthday every because he got to spend it with his cousins.  I literally have the best family.

Happy Birthday to you, you live in a zoo, you look like a monkey....

Spinning
Family group shot

Solar eclipses are really weird.  Shadows of things begin to refract into multiple images, some shadows appear to be writhing snakes when you get closer to the eclipse.  As it gets darker, the animals start settling down and it gets really quiet.  Then the temperature drops about ten degrees.  It feels kind of sudden.  We all had special glasses for the eclipse that would allow us to see it but not damage our eyes.  Kind of like welding goggles but cheaper.

Strange refracting shadows

More

you can't see it in a still photo, but these were snaking around.  Really weird

And then something happened that I was completely unprepared for.  The eclipse went into totality.  We were on my front lawn and the only other people we saw was one of our neighbors on their front lawn.  When the eclipse went into totality, it was an emotional experience for me and everyone else in our group.  And then we heard it.  100,000 people in backyards and parks raising their voices in jubilation.

I couldn't help myself, I thought of a passage in the Book of Job in the Bible.

Job 38: 4, 7   "Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?.....
.....and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

This wasn't just an emotional moment for me, it was also profoundly spiritual.  I make no excuses or apologies for that.

As you could see from the first picture of this blog post, I was having trouble getting a good shot of the sun.  I abandoned the thought of getting a picture for myself and was going to bum one off one of our family members who is a photographer.  But then, as the eclipse began to emerge from totality, he said, "Just take a picture!"  So I did.  I got exactly one photo of the eclipse.  I got a photo when it went into what is called the diamond ring phase.  Here it is.

The diamond ring phase of the total solar eclipse of 2017

My uncle let some people view the eclipse from his yard.  I think they were from England or somewhere else in Europe.  They had seen four other total solar eclipses around the world.  They told him this one might have been the best.  Southeast Idaho has an elevation of 4800 feet above sea level.  There is no heavy industry here, mostly farming.  The air is clear and the sky is blue.  And if you are thinking of coming here and causing a ruckus, the mosquitoes are seven times normal size and can carry off dogs and small children!  If you aren't planning on causing a ruckus, the mosquitoes will leave you alone.

Almost as soon as the eclipse ended, the airplanes began leaving.  We live next to a small, municipal airport that can really only land private aircraft.  The airplanes took off one after another for hours.  From my hometown to Salt Lake City, Utah, it is about four hours if you drive the speed limit.  If you are a Utah driver, you can make it in about three.  Our friends who came up from Utah said it took them eight hours to get from our town to Salt Lake City.  I asked them if it was worth it and they said, "Oh yeah."  They had no complaints.  All those people I didn't see were actually here.  Because of where we live and where our family lives, they were able to get on a state highway and get right out of town.  Apparently no one left that way.  They may have added about a half an hour to their trip back to Seattle.

This was an exceptional experience.  Made all the better because of family.  I want to do it again.


Epic "Roadtrip" Part I:  Yellowstone/Grand Teton

Epic "Roadtrip" Part II:  Lewis & Clark Caverns

Epic "Roadtrip" Part III:  Teton Dam

Thursday, May 21, 2020

August 2017: Epic "Roadtrip" Part III: Teton Dam

The ruins of the Teton Dam, a monument to arrogance

The Teton Dam(it)
When I was a schoolboy, the passage of time was defined by B.C., meaning Before Christ and A.D. meaning Anno Domini which translates to "In the year of our Lord."  The Gregorian calendar used those terms.  We are still using the Gregorian calendar, but the terms have been changed in order to reflect a less religious bias since not everyone is Christian.  Now the terms are B.C.E meaning Before the Common Era and C.E. meaning Common Era.  The names are changed but it still means the same thing.  Kind of like if we change the name, maybe no one will know what it was.  Whatever.  I'm not a fan of political correctness.  I think it makes people hide in plain sight.  I'd much rather know who someone is than discover it after I've invested months into a friendship.  But I digress.

In southeast Idaho, in farming towns of Teton, Sugar City, Rexburg, Salem, Hibbard, Burton and Menan, time is measured by the distinction of B.F. and A.F.  Before the flood and after the flood.  On June 5th, 1976 the Teton Dam burst and sent two million cubic feet per second spilling down the Teton Canyon.  If you do the math, that is more than 23 times the average flow of Niagara Falls.  Here in Idaho, we don't do anything partway.

Below the dam.  This used to be a beautiful valley, home to Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout.  Where you see the road is more of
the original channel of the Teton River.  Most of the flat plain throughout this photograph is the flood debris that was
deposited when the dam broke.

In 1961 there was a severe drought in southeast Idaho and in 1962 there was a season of severe flooding.  There was a proposal to build a dam on the Teton River to control flooding and to store water for irrigation.  In addition, they would build a hydroelectric plant to supplement the area's power grid.  It all seemed perfect.

Construction was begun in 1972.  During the construction of the dam, it became clear that the surrounding rock of the canyon was unsuitable for a dam.  It was composed of basalt and rhyolite, both of which are very permeable.  The area surrounding the dam site is also seismically active.  In the five years prior to construction of the dam, five earthquakes had been recorded, two of them large enough to be concerning.  The Bureau of Reclamation decided to go ahead with their plans regardless.  Several conservation groups protested the construction of the dam and filed a suit in federal court.  They failed.  The dam failed.  Everybody failed.

This deer failed

The Bureau of Reclamation decided to fill the cavities in the rock with grout and continue construction.  Some of the cavities were large enough to walk into.  One of them was a hundred feet long.  They pumped tens of thousands of tons of grout into the cracks and didn't fill them.  They decided it was enough and stopped.  My best friend's uncle was one of the chief engineers on the project and gave warning after warning about the integrity of the surrounding rock.  They were ignored.  He kept explicit notes of every aspect of the project in a stack of notebooks my friend described as two feet high.  When the dam failed, guess who they went after?  Yup.  My friend's uncle.  He presented his evidence and was cleared of wrongdoing.  They had to go higher up the command chain.  If this isn't a parable for backing up your personal files, I don't know what is.

The Teton Dam site is not a pretty sight.  It's downright ugly.  When you compare the before and after photos, even 41 years after photos, it is stunning.  The Teton River Valley had been one of America's scenic rivers.  Still, further upstream it is still beautiful.  The area in the vicinity of the dam, a few miles downstream and a few miles upstream looks like a warzone.  Mostly in this blog, I focus on the beautiful things in the area.  Every now and then I focus on the historical stuff.  This is a place that is worth seeing if only to understand the arrogance of people who think they know better.

The canyon upstream of the dam is accessible if you know where the old boat launch was supposed to be.  I do and we took our extended family down into the canyon.

You can still see one of the grout lines the Bureau of Reclamation poured to try to seal the surrounding rock

When I was a boy scout, we used to take tours out to the dam site to see the progress of construction.  There was a visitors center with an observation deck to view the work.  The visitors center was beautifully landscaped with different plants.  One day, the project manager was giving a tour of the dam site for members of several environmental lobbies.  They, of course were opposed to the dam.  As he was describing all of the plants around the center, one of the environmentalists asked him about the one spot that had no landscaping in it.  He retorted, "That's where we're going to bury an environmentalist head first!"  That wasn't very diplomatic.  My mother is the one who told me that story, so I am certain she edited out the part about the part of the anatomy they were going leave above ground to kiss.  What can I say, it was the seventies.  People talked like that back then.  The environmentalist was not amused, and he shouldn't have been, and in fact had the last laugh.  It was a hollow laugh because the dam breaking and the havoc it caused wasn't very funny.

We hung out in the canyon for awhile to let the dogs get wet, and skipped a bunch of rocks in the river.

Skipping rocks just upstream of the dam

The puppies had to get in on the action

They ended construction of the dam and began filling it in November of 1975.  They began filling it at the rate of one foot a day.  Because of heavy snowfall, the chief engineer requested they double the fill rate.  It's important to fill an earthen dam slowly to allow the silt and the clay to skin up and provide a barrier to water leakage.  If you fill it too fast, the water permeates the fill and you never develop a skin or barrier.  They asked to double the fill rate one more time and were approved.  They were filling it at the rate of four feet per day.  Everything they did on this project was conceived in arrogance.  It was a perfect storm of events.

Right after the first of June 1976,  the canyon below the dam began shooting out streams of high pressure water.  This is not uncommon in an earth filled dam.  On June 5th, two wet spots formed on the face of the dam.  Sometime after that, the wet spots turned into actual leaks.  The leaks grew with each passing minute and the project manager sent two D-9 Caterpillars down  the face of the dam to try to patch the leaks.  They were pushing tons of rock and fill into the holes but the holes kept getting bigger.  A photographer and his family were passing by and decided to observe the dam.  He started photographing everything and so we have a play by play, step by step photographic essay of the failure of the Teton Dam.  When the collapse became imminent, the two Cat operators abandoned the machinery and ran for their lives.  Then the dam broke and the flood occurred.

The break occurred on the left side of this photo.  The right side of the photo is an exploratory trench dug by the Army Corps of Engineers to ascertain the cause of the dam's failure.

The D-9 Cats were found, mangled beyond repair several miles downstream.  One of them was described as being rolled into a ball.  That's the power of water.  The water rushed down the canyon and destroyed the town of Wilford, Idaho.  All that was left of Wilford was a closet from a house.  Why the closet was left but the house was gone we may never know.  There were still dresses in it.  The flood may have hit the town of Newdale, but I am not sure of that.  It hit the corner of the town of Teton and completely flooded the town of Sugar City.  By the time it hit Sugar City, the flood had spread out to about a mile wide and was about fifteen feet tall nearest the river.  When it exited the canyon and spread out, the estimated speed was 40 feet per second.  That is faster than you can run.

Rexburg was next.  About half of Rexburg was built on the hill and the other half was down in the valley.  The homes on the hill were untouched but the homes on the plain were flooded.  Many people, when they returned to their properties discovered that their homes were no longer there.  They were gone.  My uncle thought his home was alright until he inspected the foundation and discovered socks and other clothing stuck between the foundation and the outer walls.  His home had raised up with the water and settled back down on the foundation, but at an angle.  Clothing had floated in-between the foundation and the walls and had become trapped there when it resettled.  The pipes were the only thing that stopped it from floating away.  Total loss.  A few other farming communities were destroyed as well.  The estimates were that one billion dollars of damage was done as a result of this flood.  I indexed that for inflation from 1976 to 2017 when we took this trip.  In 2017 dollars it would be 4.3 billion dollars.  That's alot of potatoes.  Eleven people lost their lives as a result of the flood.  One of the fatalities suffered a heart attack as he was trying to save his stuff.  He died a few days later.

As you can see, this was once a beautiful canyon

This  is the channel that the water passed through to get to the other side of the dam.  The dam is just out of sight on the left of this picture.

FEMA came in the next day to set up their operation.  The man on point from Idaho was my sister's father-in-law.  He was the president of one of the local church congregations and everyone went through him.  The FEMA guys told him they needed a list that accounted for every person in the flood zone and it would take him at least a week to compile it.  He reached into his satchel and handed it to them, typed and collated.  They were stunned.  Then they asked him for another set of information which they said would take at least two weeks to compile.  He reached into his satchel and produced that paperwork, once again neatly typed and organized.  Then they asked for another bit of information that they knew would take at least a month to get.  This time he told them they had already acquired the information, it was being typed up and would be to them in the morning.  Then the FEMA guys said, "President, we are just going to sit back and observe.  If you need anything from us we will be glad to assist."  The handling of the Teton Dam Flood by the residents is still used as a teaching example all over the nation for how to handle a disaster the right way.  Never underestimate Idahoans.  President Gerald Ford praised the residents of Idaho for not only the way they handled the disaster but also for the fact that the Idaho farmers were exceptionally honest when filing their claims.

In all the years and times I have visited the Teton Dam ruins, I had only been in the canyon and in the cut made by the Army Corps of Engineers.  This time, though, some of our group decided they wanted to climb to the top of the dam.  I had never done this before.  New adventure.

Climbing to the top of the dam

It's pretty steep

as you can see

Thousands of people were displaced.  Proud Idahoans had become refugees in a matter of moments.  The town of Rexburg was a divided town B.F. (Before Flood)  Most of the people living on the hill were employed by the local college and the people who lived in the valley were mostly farmers.  The two groups didn't mix much.  When all the valley people were displaced, the hill people opened their homes to them and sheltered and fed them.  Then they helped them muck out their homes and businesses.  People from all over the western United States arrived within days by the busload and helped clean up the town and help the people who were displaced.  It was an amazing show of solidarity and what can happen when we are our brothers keepers.  We had several people living in our house and so did everyone I knew who lived on the hill.  Eventually, the government built several trailer parks in the area to temporarily house the displaced while they rebuilt.  The people called the mobile home parks Hudville, Mudville, Spudville and Floodville.

After the flood, or A.F., Rexburg became one town with friendships borne of catastrophe that have lasted through generations.  It took a great deal of compassion for the people up on the hill to open their homes and a great deal of humility for the people in the valley to accept the help.  One people from two.

This used to be a pretty valley.  You can see the remnants of the roads the Bureau of Reclamation built to ease the construction of the dam.  to the right is the road to the bottom of the canyon.  The top of that road is concrete and was supposed to be the boat launch for recreation in the reservoir.  That is the road to the bottom of the canyon today.

My son and my niece climbing up the dam

Looking into the cut made by the Army Corps of Engineers from the top of the dam.  That is erosion on the silt layer.

This was the under the dam spillway, intended to control how much water was allowed in the reservoir.  It was also intended to divert water to turbines for the generation of electricity.

When the immediate needs of the people had been satisfied, the government enlisted the Army Corps of Engineers to cut into the undamaged side of the dam in order to determine who to blame.  When you look up into the cut, the center of the dam is silt and clay.  Then both sides of the dam were encased in a boulder layer.  Boulders up to the size of casaba melons.  The fill for this dam came from the Bitch Creek drainage.  If you read my last post, you know a little about Idaho and it's place names.  Bitch Creek is pronounced Bitch Crick here.  If you come here and say "creek" everyone will know you are a tourist.

The cool thing about Bitch Creek is a particular stone.  We call it Teton Jade.  A friend of mine put it on a machine that had flashing lights and noises that went "katalachang" and got the exact mineral composition of the stone.  Turns out it is a distant cousin of jade but not the real stuff.  That being said, it looks like jade, it feels like jade and it works like jade.  Everything about it screams jade except chemistry.  That is what a lot of the rock in the boulder layer is.  Teton Jade.  I have collected it on the dam many times.  I have found some beautiful pieces too.  When you cut it on a rocksaw (which I have) if you cut it thin enough you can see light glow green through it.  It's pretty spectacular.

Slowpokes

Hanging out near the top

You can see the water scour at the bottom of the picture, center right.  The rocks were torn from this side of the canyon as the water rushed through.  Just evidence of the raw destructive power of water.

In the cut from the Army Corps of Engineers, and also where I hunt Teton Jade

You can see the silt core of the dam with the boulder layers on either side.

I took everyone into the cut after we went up to the top of the dam and of course the kids decided they needed to go rock climbing.  I had never climbed up the rocks on the canyon wall before so I went up.  Lots of cool experiences on this day.  You think you know everything about a place and then you take someone new and they see it from a different point of view.  If you are smart you will try to see it as they do and you will learn cool new things.  If you aren't smart, well, you probably didn't read all the way to here anyway so no harm done.
One of my nephews

Climbing up the canyon face with one of my sons

I got in on the act with one of my nieces

The view from above looking into the cut from the canyon side

When I first started writing this blog post, I thought it would be a shorty.  I've been to the Teton Dam site many times, so it's part of my normal.  But when I took family members who had never been, it stirred up many memories.  I felt I needed to tell the story of the Teton Dam from my point of view.  There is a lot of history around my home, if you know where to find it.  I live in a great part of a great country.  I'm glad I do.

Here is a link to a YouTube video about that day in June


Epic "Roadtrip" Part I:  Yellowstone/Grand Teton

Epic "Roadtrip" Part II:  Lewis & Clark Caverns

Epic "Roadtrip" Part IV:  Total Eclipse of the Sun



Wednesday, May 20, 2020

August 2017: Epic "Roadtrip" Part II: Lewis & Clark Caverns

Mighty stalagmites

Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park
You had one job, Lewis and Clark!  One job.  Go and explore the Louisiana Purchase and find out what is there.  One job!  On July 31st, 1805, The Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, camped along Antelope Creek within view of the caverns that would one day bear their names.  And they didn't discover them.  One job, guys and you blew it!

The actual discovery of Lewis and Clark Caverns would have to wait 87 years until 1892 when a couple of ranchers stumbled upon them while hunting elk.  Supposedly they saw steam coming out of the ground and investigated.  They found limestone caverns with strange formations of stalactites and stalagmites and many other kinds of features.  I do not believe that the entire caverns have been explored yet.  Those guys are credited with the discovery.  But like all good discoveries, someone else claimed to have visited the caverns ten years earlier in 1882.  I don't have enough information to make a judgement.

Sixteen years later, in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt declared the 124 acres to be Lewis and Clark Caverns National Monument.  During The Great Depression, the Civil Conservation Corps made improvements on the caverns for ease of visiting, including blasting a tunnel over a hundred yards long from two directions.  They met right in the middle.  That means without GPS or digital mapping, their surveying was really good.  In 1937, Woodrow Wilson removed National Monument status away from the caverns and ownership reverted to the state of Montana.  Now it is part of the Montana State Park program.

Lewis and Clark Caverns is about two hours and forty-five minutes away from my home.  It was a favorite destination when I was a boy.  I think I must have visited the caverns at least five times as a boy and two or three more times as an adult.  The tour is about an hour and a half long and is guided by young people.  I've been going since the early seventies, and the script has not changed in all of that time.  An hour and a half of young people telling "dad jokes."

The Hot Chick's sister arrived with her family and we all headed north for Lewis and Clark Caverns.  The Hot Chick's brother and his family were already with us.  We had a group of fourteen people with three families and a bunch of kids.

The hike to the caverns is about a mile of switchbacks and the elevation gain is about 900 feet.  I think the trail is about a mile and a half from the visitors center to the cave opening,  Along the paved trail are fossilized coral and other marine life.  No one is allowed to enter the cave without a guide, so The Hot Chick and I took our time.  No sense getting all hot and sweaty running up the trail.  The kids had no such discipline.  We made the cave entrance about the same time as the guide and the tour began.

I'm going to get most of the talking out of the way here and then I'll just show a bunch of pictures.  It's that kind of blog post.


The kids playing a strange game at a rest area

I'm pretty sure this is the Jefferson River.  Lewis and Clark named it for President Thomas Jefferson.
They knew which side their bread was buttered.

Lewis and Clark camped right under this mountain, unaware of the cave features and the awesomeness

That's where they camped

Coral

More coral

I like rocks

There's that pesky vulture again

At the cavern entrance, waiting for the young guide, armed with dad jokes

The guide had to give us the rundown of cave etiquette and rules before we could enter.  There are rules about caving that are important.  Bats are an important species and their populations are dwindling.  If you have been in a cave east of the Mississippi, you shouldn't bring anything into a western cave that you took with you in the eastern cave.  There is a fungus that can kill bats and make them abort their young.  I know, bats were scary even before Corona-virus.  There is no flash photography in the first part of the cave where the bats are.  Apparently bats are kind of like humans and don't like having camera flashes blind them.  There is also the talk about not taking any stalactites from the cave and things like that.  Let's go caving.


The original discovery site.  Somehow I began to feel like a character in The Count of Monte Cristo

Fuzzy picture of the stairs down.  Not allowed to use the flash here

Cave popcorn and stalactites

Broken stuff that has fused back on the surface

A really cool stalagmite

I don't remember what this feature was called, there are several different kinds of flowstone in these caverns

Between 1882 and 1908, the discoverer of the caverns used to take tours.  In this room, he allowed visitors to break off a
stalactite and take it as a souvenir.  We will never know what this room could have looked like.  Stupid people.

I think they called these the soda straws

Different kind of flowstone

Stuff like this is everywhere

Large column, where a stalactite and a stalagmite meet

Broken stalactite that shows the growth rings, very much like trees, but made of rock.  I am not sure if this was
broken by earthquake, vandals, or the CCC when they were blasting in the cave.

Cave popcorn

Several windows to shoot through.  At this point in the cave they had certain
features lit with electric light.  They were planning an overhaul of the electrical
system to light the cave with LEDs.  I have seen a photo recently that makes me
believe they have finished that job.

Coolness abounds

I started feeling like I belonged in a Hobbit movie

About this point in the tour, a couple of us noticed a man and his son were kind of outliers in the tour.  They kept hanging back and kept trying to get further and further away from the guide and the group.  It was obvious they had been drinking.  We started hanging back to keep an eye on them.  Sure enough, when the group had gone on, the son started to vandalize a room.  Nothing really bad, but bad enough.  I told him in my 'dad voice' to "Put that down!"  The dad made an excuse and I glared at him and pointed at him and pointed down the path to where the group was and then waited for them to go.  We kept our eyes on them throughout.  They were up to no good.  By the end of the tour, I snitched on them.  Totally ratted them out.

In the last major room of the cavern, I saw them sneak off down a different passageway.  I pointed it out to the guide who radioed in for some security dudes to take care of business.  I'm not normally a snitch, but don't vandalize something like this in front of me.  I can't be a passive observer to that kind of crap.

This is one of the best caverns in the western United States

On and on it goes

They take candlelight tours of the caverns in December and January

I think the dad joke here is that Santa Claus is on top of this one

It keeps on going

And still a different kind of flowstone

In case you are hungry, cave popcorn.  Hard on the teeth though

Steps made by the CCC

I'm not sure why I photographed The Hot Chick's foot

Toward the end of the cave, they started adding colored light

Which made it even more magical, like the first twenty minutes of The Wizard of Oz
and then suddenly, technicolor.

This is really a cool cave system.  I'd recommend you put it on your southwest Montana
trip itinerary.  If  you are a vandal, go somewhere else.  

lots of stuff to look at

The tour is an hour and a half.  About halfway through, the guide turns out all
the lights.  It is so dark, and no light gets down that deep.  You cannot see your
hand in front of your face.  Some people get a little freaked by that.

Some of the features are still growing in the cave.  You are not allowed to touch the cave features because oils on your hands can alter the growth patterns of the stalactites and stalagmites.  Repeated touching can kill the growth of these features.

More colored light

This is the pipe organ in the cathedral room.

This chunk of wood used to hold lanterns in the 1930's

Some of us outside the cave.

Virginia City, Montana
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about Bannock, Montana which is due west of Virginia City.  Bannock was the territorial capital of Montana and then it shifted to Virginia City.  Lots of crime there, and finally Sheriff Henry Plummer and his gang were hanged by vigilantes.  The jury is out still as to whether Plummer was guilty, but after the hangings the robberies stopped.  Do the math.

Virginia City is a short distance away from Lewis and Clark Caverns, so we stopped on the way home.  We didn't have time to walk around the city, but we did go up to Boot Hill to pay our respects to the men who met their end at a necktie party.

We will visit Virginia City and it's sister, Nevada City another time and I will devote an entire blog post to it.

On boot hill

Vigilante grave.  Offerings left

The markers have been stabilized over time

Probably repainted here and there

More offerings

These men lived hard and died hard.  Sounds like a movie title

Virginia City from Boot Hill.  Virginia City is not technically a ghost town, but the downtown is like a giant open to the public museum.  

Sign

I'm pretty sure outlaws weren't buried this nicely.  Pretty sure this grave is a leading citizen.

Sunset

We love showing people the sights around here.  For being as remote as we are and as sparsely populated, there's a lot of history in our area and a lot of things to see and do.  We know how to show people a good time.


Epic "Roadtrip" Part I:  Yellowstone/Grand Teton

Epic "Roadtrip" Part III:  Teton Dam

Epic "Roadtrip" Part IV:  Total Eclipse of the Sun