Finally! Working Windshield Wipers

Ludwig's windshield wipers used to work, but they got slower and slower and slower and eventually they were so slow that they didn't move at all. That's pretty slow. We had the good fortune to have not one, but two! replacement motors, an older one from Beau & Esther (former '71 owner/operators) and a newer one from PJAlau (a '70 owner/operator we met in Maupin).

Before we got to the real work, we got this picture for the Library's READ poster series. The end result would have "READ" printed really big above me. I hate being photographed, and especially hate being posed for photographs, so we might have to try again when I'm in better light and a better mood.

Another thing we wanted to take care of was our filthy filthy fuel filter. It was sludgier than the photo lets on and after I got it off, I was amazed that it hadn't yet stranded us someplace. (Any such stranding would've been temporary as we carry a back-up filter in the glove box.) It even had a big chunk of rust partly blocking the inlet side. We'll have to seriously consider stripping and refinishing the inside of Ludwig's gas tank the next time the engine is out. Mmmmm: muriatic acid.

On to the serious business. To get at the motor we had to remove the parcel tray and the glove box. Ludwig's glove box was salvaged from a 1977 passenger van in a junkyard in Lincoln, incidentally. The boot from the alternator to the fan housing was also taken out of that bus.

Little E wanted to see what was going on behind where the glove box used to be.

Surprise! It's a terrific mess of wires and loose connections almost too gruesome to contemplate. For her seventh birthday we'll teach Esmé about electricity, give her a multimeter and a schematic, and make her clean it all up.


The culprit (the gray cylinder at center). Actually, the story gets very embarrassing here. I happened to look at the fuse box while I was down there and noticed a blown fuse. Guess which fuse was blown? Of course. With a new fuse there, the wipers ran. Ooops. But they ran slowly, friends, very slowly. And then it all came back to me, as though I'd just eaten a petite madeleine with some tea: on an ice fishing trip in February '07, an unexpected heavy wet snow found me up near Kalispell with quite sluggishly running wipers. All at once they abandoned their task, and I looked at the fuse. Blown. I suspected then that the load had been too great for the frail motor, and that the fuse had sacrificed itself for the greater good. My mental note to replace the fuse must've been sent to the round file as I didn't think about it again until well into this affair.
Melissa and I agreed however that the freshly-fused motor was still much much too pokey to be of any real use. Really: if it ran well we'd've let it be; replacing the motor isn't something you'd do just for fun, believe me. Out it came.

The whole project didn't turn out to be quite the nightmare I'd envisioned, so with a little time left to spare, I gave E some navigator lessons. She flunked her first test by failing to properly belt herself in and leaving her door open. At least she looks penitent about it.

As you can see, the new motor works swimmingly. We ended up using the newer one as it looked exactly the same as the bum one and their part numbers were closer as well. And most importantly, all the wires were the same colors. Look out rain and snow, here we come....

(this post is dedicated to Peter--thanks again for the motor!)

Down Fire Road 92

E conked out for a midmorning nap while we loaded up Ludwig for the road ahead. Look at how nicely that pop top pops up up top.

The Boulder River meandered gently through the meadows next to the road. There were a lot of these dead trees around.

We've not seen so many (so much?) cattle hanging around in a National Forest before.

All of these cattle were branded of course, and there were cattle guards (those metal rumble bars that cattle are loathe to cross) at the fence lines. Unlike the pair I hassled the day before, these two didn't cause Melissa any trouble as she drove past.

As we wound up the road we started running out of mountains. There were a couple weirdly numbered intersections where the numbers on the signs didn't match the numbers in our DeLorme's Montana Atlas & Gazetteer. Maybe a Forest Service map would've been better. At one point, we took what we pretty quickly recognized was a wrong turn, and Melissa performed an admirable 3-point turn on a very narrow road that left little room for error on one side. That is, were it much steeper, that side would be called a cliff. Further up the road, another ambiguously marked intersection got me nervous enough that I scouted ahead with the map and determined which way to go according to the lay of the land. Melissa thought this was a bit foolhardy and asked why we couldn't just turn around and go back to the interstate.

Because, my dear, I have a secret agenda for all this gadding about half-lost in the mountains. And that secret agenda is that I want Ludwig to climb over every motorable Great Divide pass in Montana (or Montana/Idaho, as the case may be) at least once. And if we just turned around and got back on the interstate, we'd've missed Champion Pass, which Fire Road 92 crosses at an elevation of 7045 feet, according to the sign. Other sources beg to differ by about 200 feet. I've decided that for future discrepancies of this sort, we will defer to the elevation given on the sign. Six down, fourteen to go.

Over the top, we looked out across the Upper Clark Fork valley. I think this smoke might've originated in a fire in Idaho someplace. We're lucky that it's been a slow fire season around Missoula, little kids burning Mount Sentinel notwithstanding.

I wonder if cattle raised a mile-and-a-quarter up are extra good eating. Maybe next time we'll "accidentally" hit one and have to take it to a butcher to be put out of its misery.

Amazingly (or maybe not so much) Esmé either slept through all the bumpiness or was indifferent to it. I think maybe she wants to be a Rally car driver when she grows up. Contrary to what usually seems to be the case, the Pacific side of this range was more sparsely forested than the Atlantic side, where we camped.



We stopped in Deer Lodge at a city park for lunch and some baby stretching time. We saw a sign for the farmer's market and thought about stopping, but when we saw it consisted of two trucks selling a few tomatoes and some flowers we kept on truckin'. The rest of the trip was, we're happy to say, unexceptional.

(miles 219,090-219,216)

Up Fire Road 92

Heading North out of Butte, the first order of business was to hump it on over the Great Divide via Elk Park Pass on I-15.

Butte practically straddles the Great Divide and as far as I can determine, which is pretty far, is the largest American city so close to it (Silver City New Mexico gets 2nd place). The traffic was pretty light (re: nonexistent) that day, so luckily there was no one behind us to get mad at our 3rd gear, 45mph progress up the grade. Ludwig's climbed a lot of passes, but not all of them very quickly. The way the thing dangling from the rearview mirror is hanging at an angle is imparting some physics lesson or other.

Melissa was shooting the drive when we came upon a couple cows. I slowed down plenty, but the camera goes all Blair Witch Project at 0:46 when one of the cows freaks out and I have to slam on the brakes and swerve to avoid hitting it.

We found Whitehouse Campground nestled in a pine and aspen wood along the Boulder River. The mosquitoes were pretty nasty but our bug spray and the fire Melissa started kept them at bay.
We all took a stroll along the river. Not much of a river at this point, but then this is probably only about five miles from its source in the Boulder Mountains. I think those dead/dying trees are victims of the Mountain Pine Beetle.

I destroyed this whirling mound of foam right after this video was made, but it began to re-form immediately. Nature: 1. Man: 0. For some reason I found it to be really mesmerizing, like Lester watching the windblown plastic bag in American Beauty.


The camera caught us eating our hot dogs and "hot dogs" around the fire. Esmé really likes wearing her gnome hat while watching the fire.

On our walks that evening and the next morning Melissa took these flower pictures. Just like in Glacier National Park, the vegetation seemed dramatically different across the Great Divide. Normally we see a handful of different flower species, but the area was abundant with blooming flowers. There were more deciduous trees and bushes than we're used to seeing too.

The second to last photo is actually a bunch of seeds. The last photo is grass in bloom. Walking around our campsite, we noticed small puffs of "smoke". It was actually our legs brushing the pollen from the blooming grass. The photo belows shows how dense this grass actually was around Ludwig.

During the night we heard distant, approaching thunder. I looked out the window and saw a big moonlit anvil building up to the Southwest and was sure we'd get hit. It threatened and boiled for a long time, but skirted past us.

(miles 219,057-219,090)

Butte America

Butte Montana, what a weird and fascinating place. It's a close rival to Trona as one of my favorite American towns.

And this is a very brief history of Butte:
Butte was a booming mining town and it all started because some folks came West looking for gold. Butte had about 500 residents until that gold started running out, and the population dropped to 240. In the 1870s some folks realized there was lots of silver in the quartz around Butte. Silver is much easier to get at since it doesn't require water, like prospecting for gold does, and water is pretty scarce around Butte. But in the 1880s things really got crazy when the mining folks realized there was lots and lots and lots of copper in the hills, pure copper veins 100 feet across in fact. This was extraordinarily fortunate because the world was at that very moment becoming electrified and what is one of the best conductors? Copper. The Anaconda Mine alone (and there were other successful mines) produced more than 50 million pounds of copper by 1887. There were a few well known richy-miner-big-wigs competing for the riches, causing a huge labor demand and helping to make Butte grow like mad. So immigrants came in droves to work the mines and by 1917 Butte's population exploded to over 100,000 (it's about 30,000 now). But besides the obvious draw-backs to the dangerous work conditions of mining, the town was nasty. And I mean poisonous nasty. The air was so nasty that the street-lights burned day and night, vegetation wouldn't grow, and dogs and cats were commonly found dead in the street. In fact, that's why the Anaconda smelter was built 30 miles from Butte. Long story short, the Great Depression happened and the copper got pricey to extract. Eventually the good old Anaconda Company decided to "mix things up" a bit in the 1950s and started open pit mining. The Berkeley Pit was born, one of the most alluring and repelling Butte attractions.

I was expecting a platform next to a hole in the ground, but I didn't expect this creepy white fluorescent lit tunnel to get there. I felt like I was in a Stanley Kubrick movie, and half-expected to have to do this scene over and over.

Behold! Montana's deepest body of water. This was the location of Butte's downtown (including thousands of houses, apartments, bars, grocery stores and an amusement park), but it was leveled for copper mining. The pit is more than a mile wide and 1800' deep. When the mining stopped in 1982, the water pumps at the bottom of the pit stopped too. The ground water seeps back into the pit towards its natural levels, but it brings the poison from the mine as it rises. The water is so toxic--in addition to being loaded with heavy metals, it's as acidic as vinegar--that it actually killed an unsuspecting migrating flock of 342 snow geese in 1995. The town has to treat the water to keep the level below their ground water level, lest they all be poisoned. I was hoping to learn more about Auditor at the pit, but we didn't see any information about him and I forgot to ask. At the visitor's center next to the pit, I unthinkingly introduced Esmé to the convenience of drinking fountains. Here's hoping that the fountain's water comes from far, far away.

After visiting the pit, we parked near the edge of uptown Butte and meandered for a couple of hours. Uptown was pretty big, I can't imagine how much bigger it must have seemed before the downtown was leveled. We were both mesmerized by the tall buildings, much taller buildings than in our lovely Missoula. We were also amazed by the lack of anything in the buildings. We tentatively decided that Butte wouldn't be the worst place to live since we could actually afford to buy a really nice house or loft, as they are cheap and aplenty. It would be hard to overstate how eerie Butte's uptown is. In floorspace and the general size of the buildings, it seems like it belongs in a town like Omaha. But it's just so...empty.

The M&M (right center) is a tavern/casino/cafe that was in continuous operation from 1890 until 2003. The story goes that when they went to lock the front door at its closing, the key wouldn't turn in the atrophied lock. It's up and running again.

The North edge of uptown Butte yields the strange juxtaposition of a turn of the century business district and a giant mining headframe.
Butte's had a huge influx of immigrants from Asia (not to mention all the other corners of the globe--in addition to its Chinatown it had a Little Italy, and communities of Lebanese, Irish, and you name it), and this is near the old heart of Chinatown.

What mining town would be complete without a red-light district? Here lies the Dumas Brothel, 1890-1982. The longest running house of prostitution in the US of A. It would've cost us $12 for a tour, so we passed. Maybe next time. After we moved to Montana I was surprised to learn that there were legal brothels in the state (and in Northern Idaho) until the early 1980s.

The Hotel Finlen overlooks Ludwig while he was parked near the brothel.

It seemed to me that the residential neighborhoods near Uptown reflected the American mining areas where the immigrants would've come from. The close-together housing and porches right up to the street look a lot like Eastern Ohio and the older mining towns in Pennsylvania.
After we'd seen most of what we wanted to see, we left the strangeness of Butte and headed North to our campground.

(Much of the above information was gleaned from various Montana books we have but are too lazy to formally cite.)
(next: camping in the mountains)

The Road to Butte

Last weekend we packed up for a not-so-far trip up the road (I-90) to Butte. We've passed through Butte several times but haven't ever stopped in Montana's 5th-largest city. Melissa thought the time was ripe so off we went. I'd been wanting to check out Butte since we've moved here, mostly because of the interesting history of the place. I was pretty excited that Mitch agreed to go, especially since spectacular camping wasn't guaranteed.
The baby supervised as we laid out some diapers to dry during the drive. This was our first extended trip where we exclusively used cloth diapers instead of disposables (we use cloth at home--yes yes yes, we're nuts (I beg to differ. The disposable diapering folks are the nutty ones.)). We managed to dry about two dozen this way. Actually, we also used cloth on the Gypsie Wagon trip. We have enough cloth diapers to last a maximum of two days, which is why sometimes we succumb to using disposables. We're not hardcore enough to hand wash the cloth diapers at campsites.

The atmosphere was unsettled as we left and we ran away from rain the whole way (PJAlau: we'll get that wiper motor in, we promise) but didn't get caught in any. These are some showers South of the interstate in Granite County.
There are occasional thunderstorms around here, but I'm more inclined to call them thundershowers. They're much less violent, infrequent, and shorter-lived than the monsters that rolled over us nearly weekly during our Summers growing up on the Great Plains. I'm told that the one chasing us did manage to dig deep within itself and issue some marble-sized hail, though. We didn't even encounter one drop of rain on the drive to Butte! And I might add that the driving was fantastic. We usually split up the driving pretty equally in Ludwig, but I have rarely driven since the baby was born. Sometimes she gets a bit freaked out when she can't see me, but she's been digging Mitch more now that she realizes he's the "fun" one. But not a whole lot is more relaxing than driving Ludwig with views like these.

Pre-storm clouds building over the Flint Creek Range

For a second I thought we'd taken a wrong turn and ended up back in SoCal, but Melissa told me these palm trees (at a gas station North of Deer Lodge) were fake. The weird coconut things on the weird palms appear to be lights. Weird.

One of these times we're going to stop and see the Anaconda Smelter Stack up close. My uncle told me the only time he was ever in Montana was when he and a college buddy drove all the way here to see this 585' smokestack (note to Lincolnites: the state capitol is 400' to the top of the dome) sometime in the 1970s. They came from Lincoln (Nebr) just to see it--the world's tallest freestanding piece of masonry--and turned right back around. The Washington Monument would fit inside it.
With only a few minutes left to go, just West of the I-90/I-15 junction, Esmé very politely asked for a nursing break.
For some reason, seeing highway signs with the names of sufficiently distant cities on them act as a kind of geographic memento mori and fill me with some measure of wistfulness. The first time I distinctly remember having this feeling was on a college road trip in late October 1992, when I saw "Winnipeg" as the control city on a sign in North Dakota somewhere along I-29. Clearly I took Kerouac too seriously in my youth.

(miles 218,951-219,057)

(next: Butte America)

Van?

VW bus ownership comes with a few guarantees. One of these is that your bus will get attention from strangers, including purchase offers, various hand signals, and notes on the windshield. I suspect there are two main reasons for this: because they have a whole sub-subculture built around them and because they--both splitties and bays--look really weird.
Another guarantee is that occasionally someone will refer to your bus as a van. Curiously, a lot of owners get really angry about this. I've not been able to quite figure out why. I'm generally willing to let it slide, perhaps because I've been known to refer to Ludwig as a van and not a bus myself.
But most curious of all was the fury some ACVW freaks aimed at Chrysler a few years back when they mentioned, in an ad, that they'd invented the minivan in the mid-1980s: "Didn't VW invent the minivan in 1949?" Yet some of these same folks get wound up when someone refers to their pre-1980 bus as a van. 
I try to avoid delving into philosophy too much on this blog, but here goes: Whatever old VW Type IIs are or aren't, minivans are a type of van. Therefore as a Type II aficionado you can either get mad at Chrysler for making false claims of precedence, or you can get mad when people call your ride a van, but you can't get mad for both reasons (of course, you can also fail to get mad at all).
For what it's worth, I promise Ludwig won't be upset if you call him a van.

Missoulaneous ACVWs

Our thingie that counts how many people visit this site--and also knows where you are: we've got our eyes on you--shows that our site traffic is down. If only our lives were interesting enough to warrant twice-weekly or even daily posts. If only. In the meantime, please feel free to browse the list of blogs in the right-hand panel to keep track of those who are a little more (and less) prolific than ourselves.

By-the-bye, these are some ACVWs we've seen around Missoula recently. First up is this 1971 Single Cab. It lived for a long time in the lot at Mountain Imports, a local shop that's willing to service these old beasts. 02McDonald and I drove his 1960 Single Cab from Lincoln Nebraska to Middleton New York and back in 2001 (post forthcoming, once I can arrange for some time with a scanner), and I loved it. In fact, I'll come right out and say it: Single Cabs are. Totally. Awesome.

Some (not us, mind you) consider 1971 to be the high-water mark for the bay window line (1968-1979), as they were equipped with the 1600cc dual-port Beetle engine and front disk brakes.
Now I'd like to introduce Bernadette, a 1975 Riviera whose owner has chatted with me in the library a few times. Seventy-fives are fuelies which means they can come with their own suite of problems, problems which, when surmounted, allow the powerplant to blossom into the finest air-cooled engine that one will ever find in a VW. I like to think I instilled a some measure of confidence in Bernadette's owner, as she went and threw down the dough for the Idiot Book and the Bentley manual, planning to dig right on in. She seems really into it and we wish her well; Bernadette looks to be a good, proud specimen.


There's another shop in town that'll tear into an old VW for you, Import Palace. Melissa stopped by there once to get me something and inquired about this black Beetle. The shop's owner said it was his and that he himself bought it off the showroom floor in 1979. I'm pretty sure it's a Champagne Edition (ah, that even so long ago VW imbibed in that whole stupid "Edition" crapola), and I think that CE convertible Beetles, especially CE convertibles that've only had one owner, are highly desirable.