Round ‘em up, move em out

June 16, 2023

Quote of the day:

“A man’s mind stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.”

Yesterday I was trying to figure out how to get home and why I was doing this. It was cloudy, cold, dreary, and there were no services along the route. Today though cold to start, the sun was with us all day, the scenery was amazing, we had intermediate towns with food and drink, we saw some history, and I changed professions. I am now a cowboy on a steel steed.

But first let me tell you about the route. I am still riding with Joshua, though he is half my age and faster so I can’t keep up. We got a late start out of Dillon having a continental breakfast we bought the night before and headed to Twin Bridges. This is a pretty neat little town. I had a great BLT at the Blue Anchor bar and grill as well as good conversation with the locals. Took some pics of the old buildings and continued on toward Virginia City. On the way I made a loop through the town of Laurin where stands an old Catholic Church listed as an historic building. The town otherwise is but a few homes and has nothing but dirt roads. One thing they did have was mosquitoes!!!! So I was pondering the reason for both…..a Catholic Church built over a hundred years ago and skeeters out in the mountains. Sure there are streams coming off the surrounding mountains but the bugs there were far worse than on the Chesapeake.

Further down the road I discovered the reason for both. This area was literally ravaged for its gold and garnet. Garnet is still being taken. For miles there are tailings of river rock and gravel dating back to around 1863. The stream/river running through this gulch was so productive that it’s profits were used to build Harvard University!!! Huge dredges were used to scrape up the soil and river bed separating rock from gold and leaving nothing but barren mounds of rock. Piles and piles go on forever. And between those piles lies ponds of stagnate water. So the skeeters are the result of the ruination of the land and the church was built to end the ruination of the 10,000 plus souls who came to make a fortune. I wonder what the young liberals at Harvard today would think if they could see the deviation that financed the building of that institute?

Further up the road one comes to what appears to be an old west town, Nevada City. Only it is really one couples collection of historic memorabilia. Charles and Sue Bovey spent countless hours, and money, collecting anything and everything of the old days they could find. Including buildings. They disassembled a trove of old log buildings and sod roofed homes and moved them to a central location for reassembly as an old west town. And each is packed with items used back in the gold rush days. They even collected trains and the dredges which devastated this gulch. It is mind boggling how anyone would even have time to collect this much let alone funds to do so. Anyhow, if you come this way you need to stop here.

The roads today were all two lane highways with speed limits of 65-70, sometimes with a shoulder but most times without. While on the way to Twin Bridges I noted a few tractor trailers stopped up ahead with lights flashing. Josh was at least a mile ahead of me and my first thought was he had been hit and traffic was stopped waiting for life flight to get there. Than I noticed cow poo all over the road and figured he was struck by a cattle truck which had turned over. When I got to the back up I realized this was not just a few trucks but a line of at least forty vehicles. I slowly made my way along side them riding on the one foot shoulder and saw the hold up. A cattle drive!!! My first!!! A Montana traffic jam. At least Josh was not killed. When I got to the front of the line it was just me and three cowboys (actually one was female….cowperson?) and a heard of noisy pooping cows. So I helped out. I drove them doggies on my steel bike, I mean steed. I stayed in the right lane while one cowboy stayed in the left and two others came up the flanks on each side. What a blast!!! They turned off into a new pasture about a half mile down the road. I asked where I could collect my pay. The answer was the privilege to participate was pay enough……yep!Oh, I also passed Beaver Head Rock which was used as a landmark for native peoples for thousands of years as a guide across the mountains to the Big Hole area. It was also a landmark used by Sacajawea when guiding Lewis and Clark this way. It is now preserved though owned by a single rancher. Carved by glacial flooding over many millennia it is a huge sandstone outcropping surrounded by beautiful flat fields and a large lake. An ideal summer home for native people providing everything they needed to survive and thrive. Strange how it now belongs to a single owner?!?