I am planning a vacation in SW Montana and wonder if anyone knows of any books that include back-country info. I am interested in relatively easy (but scenic) routes that my family can enjoy and I can navigate with a small utility trailer. Primitive campground info would also be welcome.
I have checked 4x4books.com with no luck.
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This is the sort of guidebook I am looking for (I already have one of these) , but for MT:
Approximately 10/17/03 16:36, John Davies uttered for posterity:
Roughly what area are you visiting? As in what particular cities and or features?
Reason I ask is that I notice you have picked up info from my home town, Kalispell, but your original posting mentioned SW Montana and Kalispell is proudly ensconced in NW Montana.
Might also help to know what time of year as well, as some of the nice places, say like Logan Pass, close early and open late due to white stuff.
Approximately 10/17/03 12:09, John Davies uttered for posterity:
Depends on whether your family wants to fish or hunt for gold and old gold mines [or sapphires] and whether you want dirt roads in the greener western Pioneer mountains or the drier eastern slopes of same.
Staying in the foothill area has more old forest service and timber trails than in the mountains themselves due to terrain restricting the ability to run more than one route thru...
If you come into Missoula on 12, you can drop south down thru Hamilton, then cruise down 93 until you see interesting turnoffs. If you go too far, you'll be in Lost Trail Pass which is georgeous but not exactly offroad material.
There's a really nice loop eastward thru the bitterroot forest that takes off east just south of Hamilton a few miles, then meets another road that loops back to 93. Fairly easy to navigate in a 4x4 as long as it is late enough in the year to avoid the spring snows. Or cut east to Philipsburg and hunt your own cornflower sapphires.
Or you can go further south on 93 and cut over toward Dillon, but drop off into Bannack, the old state capital and ghost town. From there, you could head for Polaris, Coolidge, Elkhorn old mines with good trails. Dillon itself might be a good base of travel...
Check this and similar sites out:
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PS. Presumably you would have 100% bear proof gear...and know the difference between a black and a grizzly.
I spotted a nice cinammon colored black over in the Belt mountains the other day while taking the pass over to my pronghorn hunting spot near White Sulpher Springs. Since I was only packing a lighter firearm and ammo for pronghorn, I didn't bother trying to harvest the bear (I did get a nice pronghorn that day though!). I may go back this weekend and try and find the bear.
Neither fishing or hunting - mainly short hikes, photography, and sight seeing. We have never stopped in the area, though we have bombed across on I-90 and once came up from Yellowstone through the Gallatin Valley and found the country to be gorgeous. I have 8 and 11 year old kids, and we usually take along mountain bikes, but because of the (hopefully) rough roads I expect to encounter, I think we will leave them home for this trip. (They get really shaken up on nasty roads.) So activities need to be relatively stress-free and kid-oriented. We will probably take no more that 10 days for the entire trip.
Forest roads, ruts and small washouts are fine, but my trailer isn't set up yet for really severe off-roading: This is my rig:
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From what I have read so far, the extreme southwest sounds great. I don't think I want to get down too close to the Yellowstone crowds - we will be there in high summer (July maybe?), though I would kind of like to go on the Beartooth Highway... I was thinking of going straight down to the extreme SW corner and exploring the Big Sheep Creek area, then working back north toward I-90 and home. Any areas as far north as I-90 and as far east as I-15 are on my wish list. Maybe a little bit north of I-90.
Rockhounding would be great - my wife is getting really interested in that. She has a tumbler, rock pick and other hand tools. If you can give me some really remote locations with great rocks she will tolerate _much_ more bouncing around to get there.... ;) Are there any placer gold areas, or is this strictly deep mining country? We might like to try a little gold panning.
That was my idea - staying in primitive or State Park campgrounds and maybe making a few runs through passes, but mostly staying in the foothills and towns.
How late do the passes stay snowed in? Is July safe?
Sounds good - I want to see Bannock and Garnet ghost towns, and maybe Elkhorn if we decide to get up toward Helena.
Well, that's a big concern - we are tent campers. Are bears a problem throughout the area, or just in primitive areas? We know about the "tame" bears that stroll through the Yellowstone campgrounds - does this happen throughout the MT mountains? Even in developed State Park cg's? Maybe we will have to stay in motels..... It would leave more room for rocks in the trailer.
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Thanks very much for the informative post and any more info..
I've been driving all over the state with the wife & kids, but haven't personally explored much yet off the main roads south of the Elkhorn mountains (Basin, Butte area). Any place in Montana is nice and has plenty of short hikes & sight seeing practically everywhere. Even without an agenda, a person could just come out here and "play it by ear" and have a great time. We live in the Helena area. If you make it up this way next summer let me know if you want to hook up for some off-roading, camping & hiking. There are some wonderful day/weekend hikes right around here (and anywhere else in the state). Gates of the Mountains & the Beartooth wilderness is just a few miles north of here. There is a medium to medium/severe jeep trail just south of here near Jefferson City that ends at a beautiful high mountain lake with good hiking/camping/fishing. There's plenty to see & do over near Deer Lodge, right along I-90 on your way home. The area all around Dillon is great. You might want to check out the Big Hole area over near Wisdom too.
I'd consider traveling no later than late June/early July. The last couple of summers have been extremely hot & dry by mid July & August, and we've had problems with forest fires.
Approximately 10/18/03 07:28, John Davies uttered for posterity:
Do a few googles on Montana cornflower sapphires. There are several locations with "dig your own" type access around Judith Gap and such. These are all commercial mines...
As for gold panning, yes there are surface deposits. Oddly enough downtown Helena used to have some of the best ones in a creek there. The area around Bannack still has gold in it, but then so does pretty much that whole area, kinda like just west of Denver. Don't expect to get rich.
The best times for panning are after the spring melt floods, as they have the velocity to pick up the small flecks of heavy gold and move it to the collection areas...which are cracks, eddies, etc. Pretty much anyplace you see the telltale black sand collecting in low spots.
Another thing to watch for in Montana is rose quartz which is ok in itself but also frequently found near gold.
Some of the best rockhounding is in the streams and rivers where the stuff gets pretty jumbled and tumbled as it comes out of the old glacial deposits.
A bit further east you run into the montana moss agates, so be sure to take a rock pick or hammer so you can chip any rock you find that has a somewhat translucent look.
Bwaaaahaaaaahaaaahaaahaaaa. Dude, this is MONTANA. I've had my rear end snowed in on I-90 after the 4th of July. Seriously, the best way to check is just keep an eye on the web based weather sites for Dillon, Hamilton, Bannack [a ghost town] etc. And check with the locals before taking any of those passes between Hwy 93 and Dillon.
Best gold nugget I've ever found was just outside of Helena, at the old Nasty Guard artillery range.
Bears tend to be more of a problem around well populated camp sites, simply because the bears are quite intelligent and are excellent at figuring out potential food sources.
The actual odds of being a bear victim though are extremely small, I'd guess not over 2-3 folks per year in the entire state, and most of them are grizzly fatalities due to getting between a grizzly and cubs or simply startling one. Making lotsa noise in bear country is a really really good thing at all times.
If you are not familiar with bear safety practices, stay in town or learn them. Some good ones are available at the Glacier Park site. Mainly keeping your food secure and avoid strong odored foods when cooking. If you are not near your car and a bear sees or smells food, it can and will, simply rip the car apart to get it. Solitary bear well away from humans are not as likely to be a problem as those habituated by nearby towns and camper sites.
the ones in north dakota were the coolest. theyre equipped with kiosk stations that offer you free dial up internet service or pay broadband access. was cool to stop at the rest stops to browse a few message boards. every time we'd come up on a rest stop the wifey would say over the cb "lemme guess, you gotta go AGAIN?". if she only knew i was stopping to talk about jeeps. ha ha
I did my masters thesis in geology on the igneous rocks of Beaverhead county. That was in '80 and a lot of the place has changed, but we were back there last summer and a lot is still the same. Headquater in Dillon at the KOA. It is pretty decent. Just south of the college is the government place where you can get BLM maps that show you what is what kind of private land. Comming form Texas where there is *NO* public land to a place like Montanna where more than half is public was a big bonus. West of Dillon in the Ruby range there are nice garnets in the streams. It is a metamorphic terrain and there are places where the garnets that are weathering out of the rock are the size of peaches. The Pioneer range is my favorite. There is a lake up there called Minneopa that you will want to fish. You can drive there not much problem. Follow the trail, it is a good trail and well marked, as if you were going to the next lake. It will take you around to where the creek feeds into Lake Minneopa and you can walk down to a nice gravel area to fish. If you are into that I can give you more details. There is a nice lake down from Bloody Dick Peak that is a sucker trap. It looks like an easy hike but it takes two to four hours even if you have done it before. Another great spot is Lake Agness. This lake has greyling and it is worth the trip to catch one of these fish just to see what one looks like. The beavehead river a little south of Dillon is great wade fishing and so is the creek at Bannock. Bannock is a good stop with the kids anyway. The road up from Argenta just past Argenta is a great place to stop and give the kids rock hammers and sent them scurrying up onto the outcrops to wack on rocks. I did this in the late '90s with my kids. While they were climbing and chipping and having a good old kid time I took nice, rounde quartzite cobbles and crammed them into every nook and crany of the minivan. This is probabbly why the brakes died a week later going through the Wind River range.
In April of 80 I married the girl of my dreame and we lit out to Montana to collect rocks for my geology thesis. I had a job as a teaching assistant for Geologic Field Mapping class and was to collect rocks as well. In the parking lot of the little normal college there was a dead '49 Willys pickup. It was advertised for $550 and I got it for $350. The resurrection of the thing is a favorite bed time story of my kids, but anyway, when we drove that Jeep through Rattlesnake Creek south of Argenta we gave her the name 'Molly Brown' because she earned it.
If any of this sounds like fun let me know and I can write more.
Molly is still in our driveway all these years later.
Excellent! Any more hints about gems in particular, and rocks in general would be greatly appreciated. We are going to purchase "Roadside Geology of MT" for a reference. Can you recommend a good MT rock hounding book or url?
My wife wants gems, but we are going to try pebble mosaics, so any other small "pretty rocks" would also be great. We obviously can't haul 2000 pounds of rock on a vacation trip, but a few big buckets of really nice of stuff are certainly practical.
Thanks everyone for the excellent advice! I appreciate it greatly, especially since I no longer drive a Jeep, but a Japanese product.... I still hang out here because this group is highly entertaining and a great resource for technical advice of all sorts.
There is a road east out of Dillon that will take you up into a low range called the Ruby mountians. There is a town there that was contaminated by evil greedy talc robber barons (at least acording to a book someone wrote). Anyway, the streams up there have gem quality garnet. There be gem quality sapphire up in the the Bitterroots by Missoula, but I am not familiar with the locality. One author of the road atlas was I seem to remember named Alt and I think that he is still on the faculty there at U of M. Alt is professer emeritus, call the department (Google: University of Montana). Also, this guy
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is reallysmart about rocks, and also he knows the trout up at lake Minneopa. There are a lot of places where the grey granite type igneous rockintruded up against limestone. This produces a mineral assemblegecalled a 'scarn' and you get some of the neatest thing you canimagine. That part of Montana is filty with places where people havescraped up these contacts with dozers making for great collecting. Lots of old mines have tailings heaps that are fun to pick over -*STAY OUT OF SHAFTS*!!! We drove all over the place in my wife's '72 Pontiac Ventura (a Nova clone) until we bought the Willys, so just be careful and have fun.
South of Dillon on the interstate about 15 or so miles, north of Clark Canyon dam a few miles is a public camp ground. BE WARNED: every every afternoon a freak meterologic condition produces 90 mph winds for about 15 minutes about an hour before sundown. This can be a real freak-out.
If you take the road that goes past Argenta and just keep going and going, the streams have flake in them. It may be that you can pan enough gold to pay for your gas.
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