MOUNTAINS, MINING AND MICROBREWS

You’d think I’d be used to the beauty of Montana by now.  My traveling companion and 24-year-old son Daniel and I are supposed to meet at the Anaconda exit off I-90 Saturday night to drive down to Georgetown Lake for a little camping followed by a drive down the Pintler Scenic Loop. He’s late (as usual). And when he gets there, he has a slight variation of the agenda in mind.

We picked Anaconda because it is to be our starting point for our day trip (only 64-miles but really did take us all day) along the Pintler Veterans’ Memorial Scenic Highway. Anaconda, just six miles south of the Interstate, is a historic mining town. While Butte has shafts and open pit mines and lots of mining history, Anaconda has the historic smelter.  The smelter still exists as do numerous beautiful old buildings typical of a town created during a time money flowed like water because of rich deposits of gold and silver in the area. Present-day Anaconda is a pleasant, well-kept small town nestled below the Flint Creek Mountains.

I thought we had agreed to drive around Anaconda looking at the historic buildings a bit, maybe get some dinner, but basically drive through the town to get to Georgetown Lake. Dan, upon hearing that the Montana Grizzly game would be on tv, had another idea. With the help of Yelp, he found a sports bar, gave the bar a call to ask if the bar would playing the Griz game. “Only on every TV screen in the place.” came the answer. Sold!

Carmel’s is about as neighborhood of a bar that you can get.  It sits one block from one of the two main roads of Anaconda (each one of them being a one-way leg of the main drag) and the owner lives in a tidy brick bungalow across the street. His name is Sean Schulte and his wife’s name is Kathy. Sean retired to Anaconda from Missoula after years of being a Teamster for Yellow Freight. As soon as he bought the bar, he deeded it over to his wife. “I want to go out of this life just like I went into it – naked and with nothing.” he likes to say.

Carmel’s is clean, the beer is cold and reasonable, the appetizers are tasty and the company is local. Just our kind of place. It has one thing totally unique that perhaps no other bar in the WORLD has, an authentic, regulation-length (that being a full 24 feet) American Brunswick shuffleboard table. American Brunswick only made 15 of these beauties in 1948 and only three are known to exist. Sean’s table is #3. Tables #1 (first off the line) and #5 still exist, the former in Chicago and the latter, Sean thinks, in San Diego. Sean says if his was #1, he’d think about taking the million dollar offer someone made to the Chicago owner of it. He’s been offered $61,000 for #3 but when a man has everything he needs in the world (a good bar, cold beer and a loving wife and partner) what more could he want?

Sean was awfully glad a couple of fellow Grizzly fans dropped in for the game. Anaconda is a little closer to Missoula but it’s not too far from Bozeman and Montana State’s Wildcats. Feelings for the rivals are a little divided in Anaconda. But for us Griz fans, seeing the Grizzlies mangle the North Dakota Sioux by nearly 40 points while sipping a local microbrew seemed like a lot of fun. I had a great time sipping my Open Cab Copper (a nice, smooth honey ale from Quarry Brewing in Butte, just a few miles to the east), cheering the many touchdowns the Grizzlies made.  However, it seemed prudent to call the game at the 2-minute mark. No use further humiliating a team obviously underprepared for the newly reconstituted Griz team. We even felt a little bit sorry for the Sioux. But the Griz needed the win.

It being nearly dark, we didn’t really want to drive up to Georgetown Lake and miss the views.  Anaconda’s most local camping is Lost Creek State Park just eight miles from the bar and not far off the Anaconda I-90 exit. Lost Creek has a bunch of comfortable pretty camping spots situated along both sides of a tight canyon of limestone cliffs, adjacent on the east side to yet another clear, sparkling Montana creek. Dan brought firewood and started a fire while I sorted through the gear I had quickly thrown into my truck. “Oh NO! I forgot the tent!” I squealed.

Looking at the sky, full of those low, dark clouds that could turn into rain likely as not, Dan said “We could just sleep out under the stars.” I’m actually a big fan of that so we made our somewhat bumpy bed in the bed of my truck so we could minimize the dew coming up from the already cold, damp ground. I reminded Mother Nature how tight we are and asked that she prevent a downpour just for the night. The clouds moved away and Sister Moon did not shine too brightly in the canyon so Dan and I could see the bazillion stars in Montana’s sky.

The next morning I could hardly wait to get started and Dan could hardly wait to stay cuddled up in his nice warm sleeping bag. Just after 8 am, I started packing up the truck, thinking I would start driving with him still sleeping in the bed of the truck. He has an amazing ability to ken when I’m just about to do something he will regret and woke up just in time to help roll up the bags and hop into the truck.

The Pintler, or Montana 1, loops 64 miles from Anaconda to Drummond through some very scenic high country – not that all of southwest Montana isn’t pretty damn scenic. The Pintler skirts the Flint Creek Range in a big loop to the other side and Phillipsburg.  Our first stop was Georgetown Lake, a beautiful 3,700-acre reservoir 6,425 feet above sea level with views to the gorgeous Anaconda Pintlers to the South and the Sapphire Range to the far west.

The lake, well known for its fishing, offers anglers some fine rainbow and brown trout and even some kokanee salmon. Cabins of all sizes and rental ranges hug the shoreline and I suspect a week there would feel like a bit of heaven.  If you are a budget traveler, several good National Forest Campgrounds are available. We stopped to fish for a while (or more correctly practice fishing), drove all the way around the lake enjoying its spectacular views and then headed down the highway toward Granite, one of Montana’s best ghost mining towns. Since I fully expect my Thursday post to be about Granite, I won’t say much here but will tell you to take the rather bumpy and narrow drive up. It’s worth it.

Philipsburg, founded in 1867, grew rapidly at a “rate of one house a day,” eventually reaching a population of about 1,500 residents. The late 1800s mining boom grew the town, including a bank where a lot of the miners had their money. (Watch for my future post on Granite Mine and Town). The town serviced its mine town neighbors like Granite, Kirkville with its Bi-metallic Mill, and Southern Cross.

You can learn a lot about a town through its museum. Philipsburg undoubtedly at one time had quite a bit of money floating around to build a swanky brick building like the hotel that now houses the Granite County Museum and Cultural Center. The Museum is a must-see for local history buffs with its very life-like ‘mine’ exhibit with a creepy soundtrack of picks hitting rock and metal in the ‘mine shaft’. You can also follow the story of the local Chinese miners who, after a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment in the US, were unable to bring their wives and children from China to live in this beautiful country where they had good-paying, albeit dangerous, jobs in the mine.

In Montana, you can almost always quench your thirst in the local brew pub - in this instance the Philipsburg Brewing Company in a quaint 2-story brightly painted building of one of the main corners right down the block from the museum. The ‘gift shop’ is housed in the old vault of the building which sometime in its past had been a bank. A somewhat forlorn shaggy dog named Bruce sat in the doorway waiting for the brewmaster, his companion, to come back from an errand. I knew I liked the place when I saw the sign “We don’t Serve Women Here; You Have to Bring Your Own.”

Small hand-written signs identifying the brews were hung over several brightly metallic vats behind glass walls next to the tasting room. The tasting room had a beautiful long bar and a menu that only serves brews. Dan and I had ‘samplers’ since we couldn’t agree on just two beers to share.  We sampled the Razzu Raspberry Wheat, an American Hefeweizen, Algonquin “Gonk” Amber (described as a German ‘Alt’ beer), Otter Water Summer Pale Ale and Pilsner Czech One-Two. My son, who immediately turned up his nose at the ‘fruity’ beer, discovered raspberry makes a strong brew just a bit tangy, not sweet at all. Proving once again you have to keep your mind open in a brewpub.

Using our very complicated rating system (what we like the most), we rated the Razzu and the Gonk 5 stars, the Otter Water - 4, the Hefeweizen - 4 stars and the Pilsner - 3. In looking at our ratings, it seems unusual (or possibly completely understandable) that our ratings follow the potency of each beer. The Razzu and Gonk, at 5.2% and 5.87% respectively took the highest ratings, with the Hefeweizen, at 5.56 not far behind. The Otter Water stands at 4.5% and the potency of the Pilsner, which had the least ‘kick’ and was the last we tried, we never did find out. By then we had ordered the Razzu and the Gonk and then maybe another one.

Being responsible drinkers, I pulled the short straw and had to be the DD (Designated Driver) which made sense since our odyssey was about over and all we had left to do was drive back to Anaconda where we left Dan’s car in front of Sean’s house. (Remember Sean and Kathy? They are very friendly folk who volunteered to ‘keep an eye’ on Dan’s car.) That meant Dan had not only most of the beer but a nice long sleep on the way back to Anaconda.

My take on the day? First of all I am so very lucky that my son is such a great travel buddy and likes the same things I like. It might be due to all those thousands of miles on the roads of America and other countries we traveled together when he was growing up. Second, the Pintler is definitely worth getting off the Interstate for. Lots to see and do. Lots of lodging if you want to rest a spell. And lots of that gorgeous Southwestern Montana scenery in which to do it.