MT 7-17 Chas M Russell Museum

My mother was a Charles M. Russell fan.  The fact that he portrayed in his works the part of Montana she was from, and the wild west, was interesting to her.

 Caroline and Tim by his studio.

 The man himself, with his indian and cowboy artifacts around him in the studio, painting one of the many Indian scouts paintings he did.

 Indian hunts were popular, so he made many of these, as well.

 This is a watercolor of Indian life.  He also sculpted, made funny trolls out of wood, and illustrated letters.  It was a nicely done museum.

 And there's the little kid's room.  Teepees, places to do art, or make a silly picture.

William's buckaroos.

MT 7-16 Elkhorn Ghost Town

 I wanted to visit a ghost town.  Not some place like Virginia City where they saved the place, and folks kept living there.  Since Bannock Days were that weekend, I wanted to go some place quieter.

ELKHORN

 Here's the town hall, dance hall, theatre, etc.  

But Elkhorn has been re-born.  There are tons of new-builds.  People are coming back!  So, there isn't much of a ghost town.

 So, we went to the graveyard.  Gotta be some ghosts there, right?  The internet had said to walk up.  We drove.  It was a pretty rough road, but our car made it fine.

There must have been times they had to keep animals out, as fences around the graves were common.

 This is the gentleman who discovered gold here.

 Yes, many of the old tombstones were wood, and no longer readable.  THey at least put the information on the fence.

Late 1800s there must have been some virus or water quality issues, as children died in bunches.

So, that was our attempt at a ghost town.

MT 7-15 Virginia City

 We'd stayed in Yellowstone, got up and went to Virginia City.  We arrived at lunch time, and had a really good pizza.  We loved the ceiling in this place.  It was an old bank, so the food storage was behind the vault doors.

There are two museums in town.  We found this one fascinating.  It had everything.  Had this 6-legged lamb.  Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe meets junk collector.

 The first iTunes.  You can have your own music player, you don't have to hear it live!

 We've heard about these types of Japanese flags.  Families or communities would sign them and give them to the soldier before leaving.  We heard about one recently, that was returned to the family of the soldier.

 Old-style desks.  You name it, this place has it.

 A local Junior College puts on vaudeville plays.  You feel kinda strange, it is so different from today's style of entertainment, but we got good seats!  There were several theatres in town back in the day.

 There was only one tavern.  And we loved the inside.  There had been 2 beer brewing places in town. Now you can get local micro-brews on tap.  We lucked out, they were having the Dog and Grog weekend when we were there.  Tim was happy.

 The town was kind of dirty.  Probably because of the weather, these buildings didn't totally decay.  They have had to reinforce some of them.  Something this old is going to be dirty.

 They have made some upgrades...

 We took a tour with this guy.  It was sunny, but he was 'sold out,' so we paid for later and found our hotel/cabin, rested, then came back.  The group he'd sold out to DIDN'T show up!  They were riding with us in the RAIN for the tour.  They were mostly from New York (wanted to know about the Jewish miners) and were loud.  They would ask him to speak up, turn up the volume.  He would say, "Okay," then keep speaking in the same tone.  Tim and I were laughing so hard.  They did eventually quiet down.  Only way they were going to hear what was going on.

 An original ATV...

 Who needs USPS? 

 Dance Hall. 

 William, after our tour of the cemetery, town, and a few other places.

This is outside the Bale of Hay tavern.  This guy had come from the next town over, Nevada City, and was waiting to see the vaudeville show.  Thought he looked in his element.

MT 7-11 Lewis & Clark Caverns

 

Lewis and Clark Caverns are so incredible and wonderful, I'm surprised more people don't know about them, and how they are so close to Yellowstone, that it could be a day trip.

Discovered late in the 19th century, yet it was named to commemorate that Lewis and Clark who went up the river right below it in the earlier part of the century.   

The cave's entrance is on the left, toward the top.  It's a bit of a hike, but I did it fine.  You exit the cave at about the level William is at, and walk straight back to where he's standing, looking at it.

The first guys who went in, had a much smaller hole.  After a dispute as to who owned the cave, and a guy who kept breaking in to take visitors, the US Government finally enhanced it for easy viewing using job corps labor.  I wonder how this recession would go if folks were willing to work that hard?

Some of the formations were huge.

This was deposits on a wall, in what they called 'bacon.'  If you see it closely, it looks like strips of bacon.

I thought the stars were interesting, as they had to literally carve them out of where a stalagmite had been.

Sometimes you had to go up...

  

Sometimes you had to go down...  The guide (in blue) was always waiting.  Occasionally, the lights the put on in the cave (in the section you're going through) go out.  She has a flashlight, but says people's phones now are wonderful to light the way.  Of course, it's not all lit, just the pathways, a bit.

At one point, you have to slide through a very small opening.  I made it, with a backpack.  But it was hot and stuffy in the cave.

There was an international group in our group (they only let certain sizes of groups go in... you pay for the tickets.  They took our picture, I took theirs.  When I said a few words in Japanese, the 3 Japanese guys were really impressed!

This was in one of the last rooms, the largest.  It kinda looks like a cathedral.

Sometime back in the 70s, a couple got drunk, and vandalized the place.  They did more damage than all the workers did while making adequate stairs and entrances.

The improvements to the cave are nice, as you go down more than you go up.

So, you exit way below where you went in, and then have an easy walk back to the car.  We sprinted, as a lightning storm had started.  It was close, and we were in the hills!

I would highly recommend this as a side-trip for anyone who wants to go spelunking without having to really work at it!  :)

MT 7-11 Museum of the Rockies

We'd heard about a great museum in Bozeman. Montana has many fossils, so it's no wonder that they have such a great museum.
So, what did William spend all of his time at? This ball machine, like the one back in Yokohama. And he kept going back to all the star shows in the planetarium. After having to pay a lot for them at Adler Planetarium, I was very appreciative that he saw so many here!
We finally forced him to see some of the dinosaur fossils on display.
I just thought this one looked freaky!
They also had a frog exhibit here. I'd seen one many years ago, and loved this one, as well.
He's not blending very well, is he?

Tokyo Summer Land

We've started a tradition in the last year or two that we all go to Tokyo Summer Land for Labor Day.  You might think there would be insane crowds going on a school holiday, but Japan does not take the day off and the Japanese kids are freshly back in school.  So, there are usually no crowds.  This was our first time on the trip and the weather was threatening rain, so there were even fewer people than last year from what we've heard.

Caroline and William were nice enough to let me open my Birthday present early.  A nice Panasonic DMC-TS3 water, shock, and, cold proof camera.  I took a few pictures and a whole bunch of video.

 The slides, wave-pool, lazy-river, and play areas kept us busy all day.  There is an amusement park area too with roller coasters and other rides.  We were having too much fun in the water to venture that far.  We were a little surprised to find a few water slides that William was not tall enough for.  At Disney World, he was tall enough to slide down the tallest, fastest water slide in North America.  Yet, in Japan, he can't go on a smaller slide?  Especially for being taller than the equivalent aged Japanese.  Odd.

Here is some of the video we shot.  It's nice having a camera that you don't worry about getting wet...

Yellowstone 7-11

Putaansuu Family at Castle Geyser

Please forgive us as we keep posting from our vacation in July.  Both Caroline and I remember visiting Yellowstone in our youth.  Since we were in the area for Caroline's family reunion, it seemed natural to make the drive to experience it with William.

Our first stop were Mammoth Springs with the terraced features.  It was a rough introduction to the park since it started pouring rain with lightening striking VERY close.  We snapped a couple of pictures and sprinted back to the car.  We drove the short distance to Mammoth Springs to find a place for lunch to find that EVERYBODY else had the same idea and there was absolutely no place to park.  We had three days of Yellowstone in front of us, and this gave us a very sour taste of what we might be in for.  But, it certainly got better.


We weren't terribly hungry, so we just moved on.  Stopped to see this petrified tree.  Looks similar to the plants I failed to keep alive in my life.  We eventually stopped in at Roosevelt Lodge for lunch.  There was parking and only a 20 minute wait.


Then on to site seeing.  This is William at Tower Waterfall.


We drove up the hill in search of a high altitude hiking path for William and I to train on (for our future attempt at climbing up Mt. Fuji).  We saw many wonderful sites including this pretty mountain meadow.


Bear!  We saw our only bear along the side of the road.  A brown bear had killed a hiker a few weeks before we got there, so people were a bit concerned about these critters.  This one was more concerned about eating the grass.


We had taken some long telephoto pictures of Bison before we realized, we'd have plenty of close encounters with them.  It is really cool to be on land that is the closest thing we have to how our country looked and lived originally.  And with these guys always getting on the road...


...it caused quite a few back-ups.  Imagine the entire country covered with Bison.  No wonder it took months for the settlers to cross the country! :-)


Even before visiting the geysers, there was lots of evidence of Yellowstone's volcanic origins.


Our first night was spent at Roosevelt Lodge.  He had never actually visited here, but it was a nice rustic looking lodge both outside...


...and in.  Though, it was a bit campyish with the mason jar glasses.


The truly rustic aspect of Roosevelt lodge is that you stay in the "Rough Rider Cabins"


They are actually kind of nice.  They had power, but...


a more traditional heating system.  Caroline was lucky to secure on park reservations.  They fill up a year in advance and we were making these plans only a couple months before.  Caroline figured out what phone numbers to call to see if any rooms opened up and she called them religiously every day until it appeared that someone cancelled their reservations in the three places we wanted to stay on the nights we wanted to stay there.  Awesome.  This eliminated hours of driving on and off the park to allow more time to site see.  And...


...you just wouldn't be on the park this early to catch the morning beauty of the place.


Lower falls on the Yellowstone river.


We kept seeing this one-eye'd red-shirted shutter-clicker where ever we went.  Kept diving in the way of our pictures...


This is apparently the area where the hiker got killed by the Grizzly bear a week or two before we visited.  Apparently someone ignored these signs and was camping in the area a month later and was also killed.  Did I mention this area was like the wilderness used to be...


The Yellowstone river was very high.


It really made for some spectacularly powerful rivers and waterfalls.  This is the Yellowstone river just above the upper falls.

Caroline found the perfect trail for William and me to do some high altitude climbing (high for us anyway.)  Mt. Washburn.


Here are the two victors at the top of Mt. Washburn.  Aren't we so Japanese with our peace signs...


For the Geyser Basin, we stayed at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, which is a nice newer hotel close to the geysers.  It was very nice, but the truly interesting lodge is the Old Faithful Inn.


Inside you can look up seven stories of old school log cabin craftsmanship gone insane...  I'm so glad they saved this place from burning down during the forrest fires.  It would have obliterated as much forrest again to rebuild it as the fires had burned.


Caroline caught this picture of Old Faithful erupting while inside the visitor's center getting the geyser schedules.  Nice.


I dressed William this morning, but I did not purposefully put him in a blue shirt to go well with the scalding hot pools.  Sometimes, I get lucky.  You know, the one-eye'd shutter-clickers in this area seemed to have a blue shirt too.  They must be color changers and therefore related to the chameleon somehow...


Boiling water everywhere...


We were headed over to Daisy geyser which was supposed to erupt in the next half hour.  We saw this one bubbling energetically and figured this was it.  We took a few pictures and waited, but the guide said that it just had a minor eruption which meant it MIGHT do something in an hour and a half.  We had just turned to walk away, when it burst to life.  It was a spectacular and long eruption.  Halfway through, we found out that this wasn't really Daisy after all, but rather Castle Geyser that wasn't on Caroline's schedule at all.  Lucky us!  We eventually saw Daisy go off as well, but it paled in comparison to Castle.


At Artist Paint Pots we saw our only mud pots.  These were going great and making great "Bloop" sounds that had the kids giggling.

Our last night in the park was spent at Yellowstone Lake Lodge.  Another huge classic.

They warned us that it might be hours before they could squeeze us in for dinner, but our pager beeped just after we dropped off our bags in the room.  It was a very nice dinner with a wonderful view of the lake.  A beautiful way to wrap up our Yellowstone adventure.