We left our nice little bush camp and drove a very short distance to Chico Hot Springs. Freda our GPS system took us up another dirt road to get there and we were starting to think that it was a furphy when we came across a couple of nice locals (one of whom had been to Australia and was up for a chat) who told us that it was just another mile down the road. Of course when we got there we could see the tar road which was about a third of the distance leading to the main road. Anyway, we're in there and for $3.50 each we soaked in the hot springs and had a great shower, something us campers cherish.
This is a tiny little mouse that we almost stepped on at our campsite last night. It looks like it is a baby that has been separated from it's mother. Hughie picked it up and put it under the ledge of a rock so that hopefully it will survive. I left a couple of tiny bits of cheese for it to eat.
Now for a soak in the springs
This is what it used to look like back in the 1930's when it had a wooden roof
The entrance to the springs. Once you got into the hotel part of the complex it was very 1920-30s and reminded me a lot of Jenolan Caves House
After leaving Chico we drove to Bozeman for a look around and then on to Butte
Friday 15th June 2018 - Really Butte in Montana
We decided to drive downtown for a look before we left town this morning and guess what, we are here another night. What a nice town. They have the biggest historical downtown district in the USA. They also have the longest running brothel in the USA. The town has grown on the copper industry. People originally came here looking for silver and gold and the by product of that was copper. William Andrews Clark went to university and learned how to smelt the copper because he knew that the eastern states were going to need copper wire for the electrification of the eastern states. He owned a couple of mines in the area. Consequently he became very rich and also owned properties in France and New York. There were also a lot of people arrived from other countries to try their luck. Butte was so diverse that the "No Smoking" signs uptown had to be written in 16 different languages. Another interesting fact is that there are currently 10,000 miles of underground tunnels beneath the city of Butte.
William Andrews Clark's mansion
It is still run as a guest house today and a few of the guests were on the tour with us. They hide all evidence of occupation before the start of the tour
A huge collection of 1930's clothes which I loved
This vase was magnificent
The house was five stories high
After lunch we went to the Berkeley mine memorial where we heard the story of how 168 workers died underground in 1917 in a fire that started from a spark igniting the tar paper around the electrical cable that went down through the mine.
Hughie being an ex coal miner this was of particular interest to us. today the mine is open cut and is one mile long by half a mile wide with an approximate depth of 1,780ft. The pit could also hold 36 billion gallons of water.
We then went to the Montana Tech Mineral Museum which had a very good collection of minerals both local and international and also some good fossils
These sapphires were found not too far from here so maybe we might do a bit of fossicking
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