Trip review

I was looking at pictures from our trip that I took mostly to remind myself to look things up on the internet when we got home.



Throughout the mountains in western Washington we saw what looked, through the rain and mist, like fall foliage but turned out to be dying evergreens. Vast areas of the forest are affected. So I looked up what might be causing that and found more information than I think I wanted to know. It’s a wonder there is a tree alive anywhere! They are being killed by any number of infestations: Pine wilt, Tip blight; Defoliation by caterpillars; Swiss Needle Cast foliage disease;. The list of tree-killing insects reads like a Dr Seuss story:

• Balsam Woolly Adelgid
• Bagworms
• Western Spruce Budworm
• Douglas-fir Tussock Moth
• Phantom Hemlock Looper

Good grief.

And then there was Butte, Montana. A dying town, one website admitted that almost all jobs there are low paying service jobs and pointedly blamed the legislature and the utility companies for the decline. But it is an Historic town (aren’t they all?) and has a few very obvious oddities. One is a huge lighted statue of the Virgin Mary on a hillside above town. Don’t ask me why – don’t know. But of course you can’t really tell what it is from way down on the highway, so it just comes across as a lighted obelisk in the dusk light. Oh well.

But in the town itself, there are huge red-lighted structures poking their way up through buildings and tress and such as the town slopes up the hillside. These, evidently are Headframes - symbols of Butte’s proud mining heritage. Called gallows frames by miners, they lowered men to work in the underground mines, and also helped to haul up the mined rock. They are “silent sentinels of the era of underground mining that punctuate the Butte landscape like metal exclamation points.”

OK…

I thought they were pointing out the ‘red-light’ districts. Shows you what I know.

Another place has a huge ‘art installation’ of horses up on a hill – not much to say about it except that someone went to a lot of expense and trouble…

And then there are the plains:

And the Badlands:

I love road trips!

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