A Viking’s Walkabout – Day 07 – Viking Navigation LLC

Lead, S.D. to Fort Benton, Mont., via Devils Tower, Wy. and Little Bighorn Battlefield in Mont.

Distance: 560 miles / 901 km

Time: ~9h20m

I apparently like large holes in the ground… Here’s a big one in Lead (“Leed”). I honestly didn’t know it at the time (I didn’t plan to be here) but this is the storied Homestake Mine. It was the largest and deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere and it produced 40,000,000 troy ounces of gold. Do the math. It is also the site of the Homestake Experiment to count neutrinos emitted during fusion in the sun. Lead gets its name (and pronunciation) from the “leads” or lodes of ore in the mine.

William Randolph Hurst’s dad bought the mine from its discoverer. Think back to the opening scenes of Citizen Kane. “Rosebud…” This is where it went down.

The entire town perches on the side of the pit. It’s tough to show in my pictures how close you are to this void while in town.

It’s apparently “Scenes From Movies That Shaped Adam’s Worldview Day.” Devils Tower, Wy. from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This one is not made out of potatoes.

It really is kinda green.

Little Bighorn with markers for where Custer’s troops fell.

Probably had it comin…

The National Cemetery in the distance.

The later-constructed memorials and markers for the places where Lakota warriors and their allies fell was very moving and well-designed.

The memorial is walled off from parts of the battlefield given over to the U.S. Calvary, but a portal is left open to view the high ground where Custer and his troops fought and died.

Schoolhouse on the Montana plains shot from Danvers Road near Louse Creek.

A cattle grate in action. I know I’m from Kansas, and I understand the principles of how these work, but this is the first time I’ve ever actually seen one work at scale! We stood there and stared at each other for a while. Hannibal Lecter / Jason Voorhees back there on the left scares me a little… I think that one knows how to cross the grate.

So we’re cruising a gravel road in Middle of Nowhere, Mont., and I realize I’m carting around a new 12 ga. pump Mossberg that I’ve never fired… And we just finished two drinks… perfect. We had stopped in Chadron, Neb. and bought a box of birdshot since all I had in the car was 00. Tossing the cans in a field we proceeded to blast away. Shorter version: Gun works; earplugs would have been nice.

Trestle on the Central Montana Rail. I was right here about 25 years ago and took one of my favorite photos with a sunflower and the bridge in the background. This one is not as good, but it was good to be back. The final fight scenes of the Travolta/Slater/Woo movie Broken Arrow were filmed near here.

The scale of the bridges in this part of Montana are crazy. Like Lethbridge tomorrow, I’m not sure we are still capable of such feats.

The Montana plains near Denton.

Geraldine, Mont. Included here for reasons not worth explaining from a quarter century ago. A beautiful place.

The Missouri River and the footbridge in Fort Benton, Mont. as seen from the third floor of the Grand Union Hotel.

War Bus parked in front of the Grand Union Hotel. This was the only hotel reservation I made more than 20 hours in advance on this trip. I really wanted to see this place. It was worth the drive. Read the story. When this hotel was built, Fort Benton was as far up the Missouri River as you could go by riverboat. In the 1870s and early 1880s, riverboat to Fort Benton was the way most travelers would go to ultimately reach Alberta and Saskatchewan. For this reason, the Grand Union was intended to be the place.

A year after it was finished the Northern Pacific Railroad reached Helena, and the Canadian Pacific reached Calgary. This killed the riverboat traffic and the Grand Union. It folded later that year. Someone has poured their heart and fortune into this place and saved it, and they have done a wonderful job.

Fort Benton has a surprisingly active nightlife with lots of good dive bars (“dive” meant as an accolade). For a small town, the main street bars were also open later than anywhere else I visited for the next few weeks. The harvest was about to start and we met lots of couples that had literally “gone to town” in advance of the harvest. They were partying it up PBR by PBR before getting down to hard work. If you go, I suggest Pastime Bar.