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)