The muse was upon me as soon as I woke up this morning, so I sat down right away and wrote another story for Spooky Montana.  This one was about the Conrad Mansion I visited a few days ago, written from the perspective of the ghost. 

Then I went to Perkins for some pancakes and headed up the mountain to the World Museum of Mining.  What an amazing place.  It is located on an original mining site called the Orphan Girl mine.  Some of the original structures are still visible!  This includes a 100-foot-tall head frame and a hoist house filled with huge equipment for pulling miners and ore down and up inside the mine.  You can still see the cages/elevators that the miners used.  Small boxes in which six or seven miners crammed in with their lunches on top of their heads to make more room.  They rode each day 2700 feet down the shaft.  Sometimes it would take forty-five minutes to get down into the mine and over to the place where they were working! 

I spent quite a bit of time exploring Hell Roarin' Gulch, a re-created mining town circa 1890. About 15 historic structures are preserved intact in the replica town, and another 15 were built from old materials by museum volunteers.  The buildings are crammed full of period artifacts.  It was a great way to see what life was like in a mining town! 

Then a recent graduate from the local mining college took several of us on an underground tour showing us the original elevator shaft of the Orphan Girl mine and much of the equipment used -- both historically and today -- inside the Butte mines.  It was an incredible experience, down in the dark wearing hard hats with miner's lights and trying to absorb a whole way of life in one go.  For anyone wishing to understand Butte, this tour is a must. 

When I left the museum, I drove out to the Berkley Pit, a former open-pit copper mine that is over a mile and a half wide.  It contains about 900 feet of contaminated water.  The pH level of the water is 2.5, and it is chock full of heavy metals and dangerous chemicals such as arsenic, cadmium, zinc, and sulfuric acid.  Yikes!

After lunch, I drove out to the Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park, a miracle deep inside the mountain canyons near Three Forks.   Lewis and Clark had explored the very mountains and valleys where I walked on their epic journey west.  The entrance to the cave itself was at the top of the mountain, just under the peak, and Lewis and Clark must have passed right by it, unknowing.  It wasn't officially discovered until 1892.  

You have to walk nearly a mile up about an 800 foot incline to reach the entrance.  The view alone is worth the climb, but the cavern itself is even more fantastic!  Not for the faint-of-heart or the claustrophobic, the cavern twists and turns and sometimes you have to bend nearly in half to crawl under a two/three foot ceiling and sometimes you have to sit down on the stone and slide down to the next level.  Parts of the cavern are huge and echoing, and some tiny chambers we came through would make a good playhouse for toddlers.  I confess it was one of these tiny miracles that I favored the most.   For some reason, I responded to that little space as a mouse might respond to its favorite hole.  It looked like a good place to curl up for a good winter's sleep - small and cozy and not at all frightening though it was hundreds of feet below the surface.  We hit one place where we were a mile above sea level and still hundreds of feet below ground.  That was weird!  Our tour guide was hilarious, with a dry sense of humor that kept everyone laughing as we crept and crawled, walked and slid through the third largest cave in the USA.

My day ended happily with spaghetti and meatballs in Bozeman, followed by a relaxing swim and bed.  I can't believe I spent so much time underground today!!