Montana Is one of our favorite places to spend time. We are heading to Butte. We haven’t been there before so we are up to see what’s around. Butte is a mining town rich in history. The Town is on the side of a mountain and the roads are steep as you climb to the top. The views are great overlooking the town and the Berkely Pit Mine. The previous owner was Anaconda Cooper, and now it’s one of the largest superfund sites. We stayed at the Koa Campground for a couple of days and hiked the Cooper way Trails and Thompson Park. Thompson Park is worth your time to hike in the woods. It is a large area with different sections to hike through. We stumbled into the area looking for a place to hike and found a quite beautiful scenic trail with history along the railroad tracks. The cooper way Trail is paved and runs along the campground and next to the Interstate. There is a fair amount of traffic noise at the campground, but otherwise, it was ok.
We spent some time look for spots to boondock and headed over towards Helena on Interstate 15. The ride through the mountains was beautiful. We found a small campground in Boulder. It was off I-15 and next to the Boulder River and called Galena Gulch. It is a BLM campground. We drove over a small wooden bridge and there was the campground. We looked around and spoke to a camper and got the lay of the land. The wooden bridge was narrow overlaid with planks and kind of scary. There were other larger rigs there so we figured we could make it. We went back to Butte, provisioned and set out to return the next day.
When we returned, there was a great site next to the river. We backed in and set up. There were pit toilets but no water. We had 50 gallons on board and with our composting toilet we have 7 to 10 days off the grid camping. During the weekend, the campground filled up and on Monday it was nearly empty again. The locals use this as a getaway and we met several local families. We sat around a campfire and learned a lot about the area. Just up the road we were told was a ghost town to visit. It was a few miles north of the campground and it’s called the town of Comet. We took a ride over and easily found it. We walked all around it and climbed the hill next to the old mine. It is set in a valley and it seemed to be a long way from everything. This is one of these places you find by someone telling you about local stuff. We enjoyed our time here and later went to Helena to look around and do some shopping.
Helena is a nice small city with everything anyone could want. We continued to search for our next boondocking site. We found a bunch of sites along Canyon Ferry Lake and eventually decided to move down to the Silos.
The Silos is a low-cost campground on the lake with pit toilets and some water availability. We found a nice site overlooking the lake with a big view and no one very close. This is an easy, good location not far from Helena. There are two things to know about its area. First are the bugs. They are big and there are a lot of them. They don’t bite, but they are annoying mostly during the late afternoon and evening unless there is a strong wind. The second thing to know is there is the likelihood that the wind will blow and be very strong coming across the lake. It will cause you concern until you understand that it is part of camping there. The first night there we had several hours of what seemed like squall conditions. The wind blew and shook the fifth wheel a lot. There were times when it seemed like we would blow away. I moved the truck around to block the wind and it did help. The wind died down after midnight. When we got up in the morning and looked around, thinking there would be damage, however, everything was as the day before. We spoke to our neighbor down the road, they were Montanans and had camped at the Silos’ before stating the tremendous wind was normal. They always expect some wind. Now we knew about the wind, it was no longer a big issue.
We would camp here again. The lake is beautiful there is good fishing and hiking. There are more people on the weekend, but not so many during the week.
