Burger Bob's is our favorite burger place. Their signage can only be classified as "self-deprecation".
Didn't bother with a burger food pic; they all look pretty much the same.
We took a 300 mile day trip off the beaten track. One thing you notice about Montana even on the beaten track is that there are lots & lots of rivers and streams. I grew up in Wisconsin, pretty darned level with at most, gently rolling hills. Wisconsin streams and rivers just meander, in no hurry to get anywhere. The Fox River crept right through the center of my hometown Oshkosh.
But in Montana, the water is always in a hurry, rushing to get somewhere. Here's a vid.
(Don't forget to go to the website to view vids.)
One of the requirements of my doing a blog is that I have to think about every photo/vid I shoot and what role, if any, it plays in the blog. And one of the extreme frustrations of composing a post is to view the shots/vids and come to the conclusion that I should've done more or done it differently.
I'd like to do a post on Bozeman's Computer & Robotics Museum, considered one of the finest museums of its kind in the world, stuck here in an unlikely corner of the Northern Rockies. We went there, I have the shots but I'm not satisfied with what I have & may go back before I post something about it.
But I ramble.
Along this scenic road, we came upon a waterfall gushing out of the side of a hill; obviously snow melt. It flows into the stream shown above. I'm not happy with the vid but not about to go back & re-shoot. Here it is.
Also, a micro-video of a butterfly landing at my feet. I really messed up the last third but was able to edit it out. Note the sound of the rushing stream just a few feet away.
Some really old history. About 10,000 years ago a glacier covered much of the very northern U.S. including Montana & as far east as upper Wisconsin. With climate change, the glacier melted slowly in Wisconsin & deposited rocks and small boulders that had to be cleared before the land could be farmed.
We learned at the natural history museum in Missoula, the melt was more cataclysmic in the northwest, Idaho Wyoming & Montana. A huge lake was formed (hundreds of square miles) that broke free suddenly. Instead of depositing the rocks & boulders where they were, they were carried along until the flow was slow enough to deposit them.
Here is a mountain meadow, at 7600 feet.
You can see these large boulders randomly strewn about. In other parts of the state, some of the boulders are as big as a bus. That says the velocity of the flow was very high (estimated at 90mph) and very deep, hundreds & hundreds of feet.
10,000 years ago...seems like a long time back but geologically speaking, it was the day before yesterday.
(To digress a bit. We know glaciers move...they flow like rivers, albeit slowly. OTOH, ice patches are stationery patches of frozen snow that don't move and can be examined archeologically for evidence of human & animal habitation. In the mountains of Wyoming & Montana, archeologists have been successful pulling cores from the ice and in probing the patches finding arrows and other evidence of human activity hundreds & thousands of years old.)
Along this same scenic byway, a series of historical markers tell the story of Joe Maurice who came to this place from Belgium in 1883 at age 13. He homesteaded and early on, a horse accident took the sight of one eye. He married and his wife had two children. In the severe winter of 1905, diphtheria took his wife and in the spring, typhoid fever took his two daughters. (The nearest doctor was 60 miles away, available only on horseback.)
He buried them in a small make-shift cemetery. The grave markers are wood, not engraved so the paint wore off decades ago. Here is what remains.
Apparently wanting to stay near his family, Joe, with his remaining eye dimming stuck it out here, still in the middle of nowhere, until 1963 when friends finally convinced him to move to a nearby rest home where he died in 1967 at age 97. Now there was on tough Montanan!
(Yes, that's Susanne in the shade near the car.)
A ski run in the summer.
Just past the end of this road is Dillon, where we stayed the last night before reaching Missoula. Now we have time to explore the downtown with its vintage late 19th century storefronts.
I love old towns & cities, like Kansas City when I visit my daughter & her family.
And here's a bit of European architecture. The building seems scrunched as I cropped out as much as I could of the 21st century...a light pole, RR crossing, cyclone fence.
End of the post.
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