After surviving the sloppy descent into Virginia City, we wasted no time in fueling up and getting back on the road. We'd covered significantly less ground than we'd planned to on the first day of the Montana Backcountry Discovery Route (MTBDR), and @mrs.turbodb had informed me that we would need to cover 200 miles per day from here on out if we were going to complete the route in the time we'd allotted.
That's a tall order - even for us - but we hoped that the long mid-summer days would allow us to tick off the remaining eight stages - and a few side attractions - as long as we didn't run into any more terrain-based road closures.
We'd get a sense for that pretty quickly on Stage 2, where the road we'd take out of town was only blocks from the one we drove in. So, with our hopes higher than our expectations, we set off up Alder Gulch toward Mt. Baldy.
The road from Virginia City to Summit is steep and narrow as it follows Alder Creek high into the Gravelly Range. Many long abandoned claims can be spotted on the way up to this site. As its name implies, Summit is a high camp and was the largest of the several located upstream from Virginia City.
Lode mining in the surrounding mountains had begun in 1864, with arrastras used to extract free milling gold from ore dug in shallow mines. These deposits lasted about ten years, with one mine alone producing $1.25 million.
A post office opened in 1867 and served faithfully until 1881. The half-dozen buildings at Summit are located on the Kearsarge Mining Company’s property, which operated a 60-stamp mill and cyanide processing plant at the site. Only a long loading chute and a large tailing dump survive today, as a testimonial to Summit’s rich past.
Montana Ghost Towns and Gold CampsMontana Mining Ghost Towns
To our delight, the roads up Mt. Baldy were composed of reasonably rocky material and in fantastic shape! Nothing like the ones leading into town from the Axolotl Lakes. My copilot had marked several historical mine sites along this part of the route, but unlike those in the Mojave Desert, the wet winters and constant growth of the forest have mostly erased them from the face of the earth. So, while it would have been nice to wander through some ruins, and check out a mill or two, instead we found ourselves cresting the saddle of Mt. Baldy in record time, before heading down again toward Ruby Reservoir.
While the pavement didn't last long, the dirt roads we found ourselves on in the Big Hole River Valley were well-graded and perfect for higher speed travel. This was a great thing but for one detail: at speeds over 40mph, the Tacoma had a bad case of the shakes!
Even without getting out of the cab, I was pretty sure I knew both what and where the problem was. I'd never personally experienced mud buildup on the wheels causing them to get out of balance, but it'd happened to some buddies on an adventure we'd taken through Utah that we ultimately deemed the FU Rain trip. Because dang if there wasn't a lot of the wet stuff. Anyhow, I asked @mrs.turbodb to "hold the wheel" while I rolled down my window and hung my upper body out of the cab like a golden retriever - a diagnostic technique they don't teach in any service manual - to see if the rear driver tire was bouncing violently against the road surface. It wasn't, an indicator that the problem was the passenger rear. I hoped that it might solve itself with a few more miles, but I soon realized that every minute I was limiting our speed to reduce the wobble, we were losing the battle against time.
And then, the perfect reason presented itself for a stop: an extremely photogenic barn!
As I'd suspected, the mud - which was really clay - was perfectly caked onto one half of the wheel. Not only on the outer faces, but on the entire inner surface as well. And that weight imbalance was more than the wheel weights and centrifugal force could overcome. Spraying it with my water bottle, I got it as goopy as I could, and then pulled as much off as possible. It wasn't perfect, but by the time I was done, I'd removed more than 5lbs of sticky glop. Enough, I hoped, to solve the problem!
Roads - sometimes as straight as an arrow through fields of green, other times winding their way along the banks of the Big Hole River - here were good, and we pushed the Tacoma to speeds we rarely see when aired down. Everything was vibrant and bright, washed clean by the recent rains, which also helped to keep the dust down.
We'd been on the road for nearly 5 hours - and it was just after 10:30am - when we ran into a road closed sign between the towns of Glen and Melrose. We hadn't been expecting any sort of trouble here - we were, it turns out, only a few hundred feet from I-15 - and I easily looped around the sign to see what all the trouble was about.
A quarter mile up the road, it was clear that we'd be looking for a detour.
Of course, being within a few hundred feet of I-15, finding a bypass wasn't going to be an issue. Still, with a few deft flicks of her fingers, @mrs.turbodb announced that she'd successfully found us a way around that would avoid the freeway and usher us across the river on another bridge!
Our short detour complete, we considered lunch but decided instead to push into the Pioneer Mountains. This would be a mistake - we'd end up eating a late lunch and an early dinner - but for now it wasn't even 11:00am, and we figured we could stop and make something to eat in Glendale, a ghost town along the route that was once a bustling center of more than 3,000 souls.
A disappearing act is being perfected in Glendale today. What was once a major city is reduced to a smelter stack and some crumbling stone walls. The first furnaces were constructed in 1875, but fire took them four years later. Another large operation began at that time, and by 1881 Glendale had “a newspaper, thirty business establishments and a population of over 700.” Ore from Hecla, Lion City and Greenwood digs was brought to Glendale to be processed, and when the Utah and Northern Railroad reached Melrose, the population of Glendale rose to 3,000.
The few remaining structures at Glendale look out over the valley in stony silence, their open doors and rock walls providing shade and shelter for wandering stock. The narrow road can get pretty rough as it follows the creek up to Lion City and the Hecla mine, nestled high in the Pioneer Mountains.
Henry Knippenberg, the general manager of the Hecla Mining Company, arrived in 1881 and built a large mansion overlooking the town, which consisted of one long main street stretching out east to west along the gulch. The big mansion on the hill is gone now and no more than two or three families currently reside in this once prosperous and bustling little boomtown.
From Montana Ghost Towns and Gold Camps
It turns out, this was a place I'd visited before. I'd stopped here for only a few minutes as I was racing to meet up for an InterVANtion with my usual Tacoma buddies deeper in the Pioneer Mountains, so it was fun to spend a little more time walking around, poking our heads into a few more of the old structures.
Climbing the hills behind Glendale, we found ourselves - once again - in rolling hills of grassy green. Luckily, this time, there wasn't so much "up" that we'd get into the wondrous white that'd slowed us down the day before, but we couldn't help but marvel at the road we'd follow up the ridgeline to the top. Every BDR has a "best time" to be there, and early summer - preferably, unlike us, after checking road conditions - is a great window for Montana.
The next stop - and one that @mrs.turbodb was very excited to see - was a cluster of charcoal kilns. We are, naturally, familiar with such kilns, as a well-known row of ten hug the hillsides above Panamint Valley in Death Valley National Park. This set, located along Canyon Creek, was used to make charcoal for firing the smelters we'd just visited at Glendale.
Hecla Mining operated its own thirty-eight-kiln charcoal plant at Canyon Creek on the other side of Lion Mountain, where mostly Canadian and French loggers cut lodgepole pine and mostly Italian kiln operators reduced it to the concentrated fuel. Before the kilns were built, they had stacked cordwood 12 feet high by 25 feet long, covered it with dirt, and set it afire to dry and carbonize slowly. While monitoring the lengthy process, the men had 12’ x 12’ cabins for shelter. Over the nineteen years that the Hecla smelter ran, Hecla loggers cut 11,665 acres of pines to produce 19 million bushels of charcoal.
Railroad service reaching into western Montana in the early 1880s greatly benefited the Hecla operations. After trains delivered coke and mining supplies, Knippenberg filled the empty cars with 90-pound bars of silver bullion that he shipped to Omaha for final processing.
Hecla properties continued to produce even after 1893, when the price of silver dropped, but in 1900, the largest smelter in Glendale was closed and torn down.
The last Hecla mine closed in 1904, though Henry Knippenberg remained convinced of the district’s value, and bought the Hecla properties at the sheriff’s sale. Lessees operated some of his mines until 1915, and then slag piles were reworked and some mines operated by various owners and leasers into the 1960s.
Half an hour later, we were cresting the high point of the route as we traversed the green meadows of Vipond Park. Up here, temperatures were significantly cooler than they'd been at the Charcoal Kilns and now that it was getting on towards 2:00pm, we decided that even without much shade - except that provided by the clouds - it was time for lunch!
And lunch was something we'd both been looking forward to. Usually we have something normal, like turkey or PB&J sandwiches. But this time we'd brought along something fancy. On my recent trip to the Sierra with my dad, I'd made us what amounted to caprese sandwiches - fresh mozzarella, juicy tomatoes, and a pesto-mayo spread. They were so good that I proposed the same to my companion for this excursion, an offer that was met with a resounding "yes!"
And so, as our little buddy sped into the sky to capture the beauty around us, we pulled the ingredients we'd need from the fridge, assembled them, and forced ourselves to slow down as we ate. The great thing about caprese is that it's so easy to make - much easier than most other sandwiches - but with tasty tomatoes and silky fresh cheese, they are a true on-the-trail treat, which I highly recommend.
With our stomachs satiated and our buddy back in its cubby, we plunged over the northern edge of the park and dropped nearly 3,000 feet in just under 7 miles of trail. This was great for our gas mileage, but we quickly found ourselves missing the cooler temps of the higher elevations.
Still, as we once again found ourselves along the Big Hole River, leapfrogging I-15, I couldn't help but wonder aloud at the landscape that stretched out into the distance. Striking spires of granite protruded above the treetops; their silvery-gray surfaces, bright against the deep green of the forest.
Ultimately - as was quickly becoming a theme - they were a surprise to only one of us. The passenger of our crew - who had done her research before leaving home - knew that they were next on our route.
Precambrian basement rock about 2.7 billion years old forms the core of the southern Highland range, well east of the highway. Farther north, the entire range becomes 70 million-year-old granite, the southern end of the Boulder batholith. The Humbug Spires Primitive Area contains a separate mass of granite that is probably a satellite of the Boulder batholith. The name derives from the towering outcrops of granite that do indeed suggest steeples rising among the pine trees.
With the spires quickly shrinking in our mirrors, we set our sights on the Moosetown water crossing. This was one that was called out specifically on the BDR map, likely due to its reasonably large size. Perhaps 50 feet wide, it'd be no problem for the Tacoma, but could pose a bit of risk if an ADV rider dropped their bike in the 18-inch-deep water, halfway across.
It was shortly after the water crossing that we'd planned our next off-route excursion. The Stratton Mill site, once a family-operated sawmill and mining complex, was only a few miles from the BDR, and seemed to have a colorful history. In fact, our resident researcher confirmed that she'd seen structures in satellite imagery of the place, so we hoped we might find a mill to wander around when we arrived.
And then, near disaster. A tree - larger than we could haul out of the way - completely blocked the BDR.
We could see where the motorcycles had been weaving their way through the woods; there was no way the Tacoma would fit. As @mrs.turbodb began to inspect the maps for a bypass, I wandered a little way down the road to look for a wider way through.
I found a way through, but for a few small-diameter obstacles. And that meant that after a few minutes exercising my "Christmas treeing" technique, we soon had a path just wide enough for a 1st gen with its mirrors folded in. Luckily for us, there were no full-size vehicles in our caravan of one.
A few uneventful minutes later, we arrived at the Stratton Mine site.
The Stratton Mill, in the Highland mining district south of Butte, was a small, family-run complex that combined a water-powered sawmill with a quartz-ore mill and nearby placer and hard-rock mining. The Stratton family arrived in the district in 1872, and Montana records indicate that the family owned its Highland mining property beginning in 1892. Family accounts identify an 1895 Pelton water wheel that supplied power to the sawmill, quartz mill and electrical system.
Commercial activity peaked in the mid-1930s. Montana’s 1935 mining directory listed the Montana Highlands Gold Mining Company, with W. F. Stratton as superintendent. The company controlled six unpatented lode and placer claims about 15 miles south of Butte and was reported to be operating in both 1934 and 1935. Its workings included a shaft, an adit and approximately 200 feet of drifts and crosscuts, with placer gravel reported to be 35 feet thick.
The operation primarily pursued gold and silver, using both underground lode workings and placer mining. And, while published records do not record the total output, the site remained productive well into the twentieth century. As late as 1989, placer miners working Cooley Gulch on the Highland Gold Property recovered the 28-ounce Centennial Nugget, described by Montana Tech as the largest recorded Montana gold nugget found since 1908.
Howard Stratton - the area's only permanent resident - built the family’s log home at the millsite in 1939, where he and his wife, Vady, raised seven children while operating the placer mine and sawmill.
In 1997, the USFS moved to evict, instructing the Strattons to sign a quitclaim deed and vacate the property with all their belongings - including five outbuildings, trucks, bulldozers and tractors - within two years.
While the family acknowledged that its mining claims had not been worked since 1992, they still claim to pay rent to the Bureau of Land Management for the mill site, property tax on the buildings to Butte-Silver Bow, and to have a bond with the Forest Service in the Butte bank.
Eviction Has Family, Ranger In WrangleStratton Mill SiteMontana MMS 2016, MBMG 685Directory of Montana Mining Properties
After poking around the old mine camp for a bit, we climbed back into the Tacoma just as a small, red, similar-era Ford Ranger trudged past the short spur and continued up the main road. Worried that we could get stuck behind them once they started climbing a series of switchbacks that led to the BDR, I pressed a little harder on the skinny pedal, so we'd catch up more quickly. This probably wasn't entirely necessary - even slow speeds for us were significantly faster than the fully-aired-up Ranger was tackling this terrain - but its driver continued on, both unsuspecting and blissfully unaware that he was being stalked by a Toyota.
To let him know I was there, I popped on the fog lights. Yellow - but still quite bright - these are almost always enough to catch a driver's eye in the rear-view mirror. Today, they got no reaction. Next, I gave a quick flash of the single SS5 that still decorated the front bumper. This is akin to a small sun illuminating every mirror pointed at any occupant of the vehicle; there is a risk of blindness if it catches you the wrong way. Nothing. Extinguishing my bumper-mounted star, I tooted the horn a few times. He finally got the message, and we waved a quick thanks as we hustled by at the next wide spot in the road.
We were on the home stretch of Stage 2, descending out of the Highland Mountains toward Butte. It was nearing 5:00pm, and we'd covered nearly 150 miles on the day.
A lot - even for us - on a BDR, but not enough to get us back on track.
Of course, we still had plenty of daylight left - and there wasn't anywhere to camp right around Butte anyway - so we called a quick audible to grab an early dinner at the royalty of burger joints, knowing that filling our bellies now would allow us to drive a little later into the evening before stopping.
And then, we were on to Stage 3!
The Whole Story
