Day 109 - Wallace, ID & Missoula, Garnet & Georgetown Lake, MT

We packed up the tent and hit the I-90. Today was going to be a long day, we had a 4 hour drive ahead of us an quite a few different sights we wanted to stop off and take a look at along the way.

Not long after setting off, Lee pulled off the Interstate and into a town called Wallace. He had seen a sign for 'Historic Wallace', a unique town with 125 years of silver mining history. Apparently the town has long been famous as the 'Silver Capital of the World' with 1.2 billion ounces being produced since 1884. They still mine silver near the town but the bigger economy is the people who now come here from skiing biking trails.

The town was definitely unique with a quirky feel that I couldn't work out whether it was for the tourists or just a representation of the history of the town and the people who live there. Either way, it was a cool place to drive around.

Back on the Interstate, we headed over the border to Montana. Usually we try to avoid Interstates as they tend to be boring, monotonous roads filled with traffic but the I-90 from Idaho to Montana was different. There was very little traffic and the scenery was amazing, it felt like we were on a scenic highway rather than an Interstate.

We stopped off at one of the rest stops for a breakfast of banana, melon, yogurt and broken up breakfast bar before continuing on our winding journey through the forests and hills of Montana.

To break up the journey, we stopped for a coffee break at the town of Missoula. This is the same place where the great Ice Age floods caused the formation of Dry Falls (which we saw yesterday). Thankfully, we didn't see any masses of water but we did find an awesome little coffee house called Zootown Brew. Lee had a Chai Tea Latte and since I hadn't had a coffee yet today, I kick started my wake up with a double espresso. The coffee was all locally roasted and the shop itself was more like a social club with fantastic internet to get some work done, conference rooms downstairs and a stage for entertainment.

Once we had both perked up, we headed back to the car via the Conflux Brewing Company. Lee is continuing his education in beer making and felt he needed to check out the newest brewing company in Missoula. The inside of this place was very cool with an industrial / skater type vibe. As it was a new brewery, beers are still being tried out so the beer list was on the wall and each of the tap handles had the name written on them in chalk so they could be changed as new brews are created and less successful ones are removed.

After just one beer, we hit the road again but this time we were heading off the I-90 and headed through farming communities towards Garnet Ghost Town.

Lee wasn't impressed when the road we were on turned into a single track dirt road, his least favourite road to drive on in a rental car! The cows grazing alongside the road kept him distracted from the bumps and craters for a little while along with my encouragement that it was "just around the corner". 

8 miles later, with no more cows to distract Lee and my 'just around the corner' act falling apart, we finally reached our destination.

Garnet is one of the best preserved mining towns in the US. In 1898, 1,000 people lived here but 20 years later, the town was abandoned when the gold ran out. In its heyday, the town boasted 13 saloons, food stores, a barber shop, mercantile store, and three hotels. A fire in 1912 destroyed half of the town but what was left, has been preserved as it was with only some minor structural changes to stop the buildings collapsing.

We enjoyed walking around Garnet, reading about what each of the buildings used to be and going inside to explore what life must have been like for a mining community in the 1900s.

Short trail to get to Garnet

One of the saloons

Lee reenacting a night in the saloon 

Grocery Store

Inside the hotel

Hotel kitchen

Posh rooms in the hotel

Cheap rooms in the hotel - you sleep between the wooden lines

Hotel 'Bathroom'

The jail

Biggest billows Lee has ever seen

A toilet each for this household

The married couples house - anyone recently married stayed here

until they could afford to build their own house

Back at the carpark, we saw a sign for a nature trail to see the old mines. We didn't have much time as we wanted to pitch the tent before dark but the sign said it was only a 20 minute walk and we thought with our youngish legs, we could beast it in 10. We were wrong. The 20 minute timing on the sign must have been for people with an electric wheelchair or quad bike, there was no way you could get around in less than 40 minutes and that's walking very fast. 

Even though it was a lot longer than we expected, we enjoyed walking through the woods looking at the different mines and some of the mining equipment left behind. 

Yeah right! 

Finally back at the car we looked at the map, the only way back onto the main road was back the way we came, along the 8 mile single road dirt track that Lee so enjoyed driving along. Ooops!

Lee manned up and got back onto the Interstate where we then headed South towards Georgetown Lake, our campsite for the night.

We couldn't choose the pitch at this campsite, it is allocated to you but we were lucky to have a huge site that backed into the woods. Time was against us so we quickly put up the tent and started a fire for dinner. There was lots of firewood lying around the campground, we couldn't believe how lucky we were that we weren't going to need to pay for any but there was a reason it was lying around the campground. The days before we had arrived, there was heavy rain and all the wood lying around had been soaked through, it wasn't dry enough yet to burn. On the positive side, the rain had meant that the fire ban had been lifted but we still needed to get our chicken cooked. Lee set out to look for the camphost where he managed to buy some dry(ish) wood and then with some help of the self lighting charcoal, managed to get a fire going.

Dinner was chicken and vegetables in a cream cheese sauce and for pudding, we made use of the hard work Lee put into getting the fire going and had roasted marshmallows on our new marshmallow roasting stick.