9/23/2021 - Thursday - A few more things at Yellowstone, driving to Butte, Montana - and a few sights in Butte. And an aftermath.

Thursday morning, we packed up and prepared to leave Yellowstone, but not before one more short hike.  It started towards Solitary Geyser.  It is in the same geyser basin as Old Faithful, but is several hundred yards from all of the other geysers.  But on the way to it, we encountered a new friend:

We arrived at the geyser at about 9:20 AM.  Since it is supposed to erupt every few minutes, we waited.   And waited.  And waited some more.  At about 9:40, we gave up.  If this geyser wants to remain solitary, it's going about it the right way!

The good news - while we waited in vain at Solitary Geyser, we met some visitors from Mobile Alabama - two brothers who were very friendly.   They were staying in the nearby town of West Yellowstone, and had discovered the same pizzeria that we ate at on Monday and Tuesday, and enjoyed it as much as we did.  They were two very nice guys - it was good to have people to chat with while we were waiting, and during the ensuing walk back towards Old Faithful.

On the way back, we got onto the boardwalk and saw a few geysers in the distance;   We then saw some eruptions at the Lion Geyser Group.  Here are some of those pictures:

This picture shows an interesting
juxtoposition of buffalo hoofprints
and elk hoofprints.  We have no idea
if they were there at the same time or not.
Obviously, they ignored the signs
posted everywhere that said to stay
off the dangerous thermal ground,
and to stay on the boardwalk!

This next feature is nothing spectacular, but its name seemed rather curious.  Some checking on google gave a strange answer:   It seems that there was a Chinese population around here in the 1850s, and they used this not spring to do their laundry!   Is this true?   I don't know!

We now left Yellowstone, and made the drive to Butte, Montana.  Margaret was especially interested in it because of its long legacy of mining metals.

The trip to Butte included a very long drive along Interstate 90.  It was striking how desolate it was.  We don't know if that's just how it always has been, or if it has been draught-stricken.  What was even more surprising was seeing people watering their lawns at the towns that were every few dozen miles.  I've seen oases in surprising places before - in Utah, and in southern Israel - so I guess they could have them in Montana also!   Here are some pictures of the scenery during the drive:

Note the lawn sprinkler - as if they were 
by the shores of the Great Lakes!

We went past Butte to the town of Anaconda.  The town was named after the nearby copper mine, owned by the same person who established the town.  The copper mine had an enormous smelter, which in turn had an enormous chimney.  The chimney was the tallest in the world (585 feet) when it was built in 1918 - and perhaps it still is.  That makes it taller than the 555-foot Washington Monument.  Here are some pictures of the chimney, and the area around it.  In particular, the small park nearby has a display showing the inside diameter of the chimney at the top.

From a distance of about 2-3 miles

from a distance of about 5miles

from a distance of about 7 miles.

We drove from Anaconda to Butte, where we checked into our hotel and then went on a tour of Butte.  The tour guide was a retired teacher who moved to Butte in the 1970s and loved it and never left.  The touring vehicle was a very loud ATV - even in a small vehicle, he had a sound system for the back seat!  The history of this old mining town is fascinating - the red light district is worthy of its own discussion!  But I only got these two pictures during the tour:

We are still high up in the Rocky Mountains.
This mine is at an altitude of 
a little more than a mile above sea level.
The shaft goes down about a mile.
So the bottom of the mine is near sea level!

There are still a number of mine towers
in Butte, although only a single
active mine remains of the hundreds
they had in the late 1800s.

This concludes the blog of our tour.   On Friday, we took a tour of the World Museum of Mining in Bozeman.  The most picturesque part of the tour was underground, in an abandoned mine - where the lighting did not lend itself to pictures.  Most of the above-ground part was reconstructed.   The most interesting thing there had nothing to do with mining - it was an Orchestrion - a contraption that looked like an upright piano, and could serve as a player piano, but had additional inner workings enabling it to also play percussion, plucked strings, and an organ!  When it played music, the keys that were depressed matched the piano part - but other mysterious mechanisms manipulated the percussion, the strings, and the wooden organ pipes.   What a feat of engineering, from the late 1800s!

After that, we attended Friday night Jewish services at the Chabad of Montana in Bozeman.  Their hospitality was exactly what one would expect of a Chabad establishment.  It was no surprise that they had a mechitza - a separation between the men's section and the women's section - but we were surprised that Margaret had the women's section to herself!  They invited us to stay for Shabbat dinner, but as we had a 6:00 AM flight the next morning, we excused ourselves so as to get to bed early.

The flight home on Saturday - from Bozeman to Salt Lake City to Detroit to Cleveland - made for another long travel day, but was otherwise uneventful.