On Sunday morning, we woke up in our tents in Yellowstone with everyone camping around us packing up to get out for the weekend. We packed up all of our stuff and headed to the Grand Prismatic Spring to try one more time to get a closer look at this thing. We parked in the lot on the ground level near the Prismatic Spring and walked up the boardwalk to where the spring was. It was worth the stop.
There was a hot spring there named Excelsior, which we found — Riley says “steamy.” The Excelsior spring used to be a geyser all by itself! Then we wandered over to the Prismatic Spring, which was very colorful, also steamy and warm. You could tell the water was warm with all the bubbling and the temperature of the water vapor coming off of the pool of water.
We loaded up back in the car after seeing a couple more of those side springs in that area and headed off towards the west entrance of Yellowstone. The traffic coming into Yellowstone at the west entrance was pretty backed up. It didn’t affect us, though, because we were leaving in the other direction. And when we got outside to West Yellowstone, the little town outside of Yellowstone, we stopped for breakfast at a small cafe, which was pretty tasty. I had an omelet, and Riley had a couple of eggs that looked pretty good with potatoes and meat.
We left there, deciding to take the Targhee Pass to detour through Idaho briefly so that we could check that state off the list, which we did. We found the land and homes in Idaho to be quite beautiful. We passed large expanses of land and a lake. It was just wide open and lovely. We came back out of Idaho into Montana. The land was mostly the same, just different signs on the road, really. There were more mountains, more open plains, and lots of cows.
We took the road directly to Butte, Montana, where our hotel was. When we got to Butte, we went directly to the Berkeley Pit, a 1,700-foot-deep pit from mining in the ground that is now mostly filled with water. Still, it contains all kinds of poisonous metals, liquids, and whatnot that are runoff from all the mining, both the process and what was found under the earth. The pit itself, with the water in it, looks like a lake; it’s so huge. When you look across the lake, it’s a little deceiving how big it is. It seems like it’s maybe not quite so far, but then you realize that the things you’re looking at across the lake are enormous towers of water-processing plants trying to clean up the water in this lake. It’s pretty impressive and a little eerie. And smells bad.
After the Berkeley Pit, we went to see Our Lady of the Mountains, the third-largest statue in the United States. The GPS directed us to a parking lot where there wasn’t much going on, but from the parking lot, you could look up into the mountain and see the statue of the Virgin Mary standing up there, looking down on all of Butte. It was not a big deal to see a statue from such a distance, and even with the binoculars, it was just a statue, but it was kind of neat to see and check off the list of Atlas Obscura-type locations that we hit along our path. After the statue, we stopped in at the hotel, dropped off our stuff, and then headed out to throw axes in Montana at the Montana Axe Bar.
Riley and I rented a lane for an hour and tossed axes at the wood. The guy at the axe place gave us the dullest axe I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I’ve seen sharper butter knives, and we had a heck of a time embedding that dull axe into the wood, but we did our best. After playing a few games at the axe-throwing place that I had not heard of and will now take back to our local place, we went to Sparky’s Garage for dinner.
Sparky’s Garage is an interesting local place. It’s got all kinds of gas station-style memorabilia and those metal signs that encourage you to choose Camel as your cigarette of choice because they’re fresh. Also, there was a metal sign with Lucille Ball talking about how she loves some particular brand of root beer, which I don’t even remember, so it wasn’t a good ad.
Riley had some kind of shrimp po’boy, and I had a pretty darn good burger. As Riley points out, the meat comes from here, so it should taste good. It did. After our dinner at Sparky’s, we went back to the hotel, showered, and crashed. We watched several Marvel movies in a row since they were playing on TNT all weekend.
That was our Sunday, and we are queued up to fly out of Bozeman to get to Seattle and meet up with the girls on Monday.
