Camp fire, Cemetery, Chicken Chilly & Cranium

We had a great end of the week, full of visitors. First Granny and Aunt Sandy came over for the day on Thursday, Jeff & Deaette came over for the day on Friday and our Dave and Em came over this past weekend to visit us. Addi was thrilled! Addi and Em had so much to catch up on! Friday night we had a fire in our outside fireplace.



On Saturday the boys went fishing and us girls went up past Boulder, MT to visit the Elkhorn Ghost Town and Cemetery. The few buildings that are left are remnants of a once bustling mining town. At it's peak the town was home to over 900 miners, their wives and children. It was a rare mining town in that many families came to live where the miners worked. They mined gold and silver. The ghost town was so weird. There were original buildings, boarded up and abandoned and next door is a newer home that had someone living there. One man was chopping wood outside his home telling us the building across the "road", the old fraternity club, was open and we could go on in. His beautiful wolf dog came up to us to say hello and the man's three-legged wolf hybrid lay in the road. It was not creepy in the way you expect a old, mining town to be. It was interesting how the possible ancestors of this mining town were still living there. I would really like to know more about the people still there and why they are still there.










The cemetery on the other hand was creepy the way I expected it to be. Creepy and devastating. About every other headstone belonged to a child, someone's baby. Several belonged to siblings, some dying on the same day. A sign explained the 1888 diphtheria epidemic which took the lives of many Elkhorn children. One family buried seven family members in one week. I can't imagine the degree of grief that was apart of everyday life in the 1800s. There were modern headstones placed next to very old headstones. People had recently placed flowers and flags at some headstones. Some headstones had elaborate writing and statues of lambs. Bible verses, nicknames and birth dates let us know who was buried there. Others were a simple, faded, nearly rotten, slabs of wood held erect by piles of rocks. No name, no birth date, just a pile of rocks.





On the way home we stopped and had lunch at a little cafe in Boulder. We also discovered that this area of Montana is also somewhat famous for Health Mines. People voluntarily go into old gold mines to soak up the healing powers of deadly levels of radon gas. Apparently hundreds of people come to this area in the summer to spend a week (3 -4 times a day) playing boards games and reading in the gas. Some say it has the ability to heal arthritis and other ailments.

The boys came home after a slow day of fishing, we had dinner and Dylan and I won a game of Cranium! The boys got up early on Sunday and tried to find the famous Helena elk. They did get within 40 yards of a few cow elk, but no bulls were with them.