Almost twenty years ago I made the impulse decision to buy a timeshare unit at Grand Timber Lodge in Breckenridge, Colorado.  It’s nice and all, but anyone will tell you a timeshare is purchase is an extremely poor financial choice. My plan was always to use it for trading purposes – to trade my week there for the opportunity to stay in similar properties around the country and the world. I’ve made reasonably good use out of it, but maintenance costs on the unit, annual membership in the trading company, and an exchange fee end up making annual carrying costs comparable to reasonably priced hotel accommodation.

I frequently find myself facing a use-it-or-lose-it situation with my exchange weeks. This year I wasn’t in the mood to travel especially far so decided to take an exchange week at Fairmont Hot Springs, a hot springs resort about 100 miles west of Bozeman between the towns of Anaconda and Butte. Montana has numerous hot springs ranging from rustic to fairly posh. Fairmont is probably the most developed of them with large outdoor and indoor pools of different temperatures into which water from the natural hot springs is channeled. Fairmont also has a significant hotel complex with restaurants and a conference center as well.  My unit was actually a short distance away in townhouses along the fairways of the resort’s golf course. Although I had big plans for some serious mountain hikes for the week, I didn’t follow through with my ambitions and mostly did a mix of local touring and relaxing in the rather nice hot pools.

My cousin Deb and her husband John came over from Bozeman on the weekend and stayed overnight. Having lived in Montana for about 15 years, including two in Butte, they are quite familiar with the place and recommended Lost Creek State Park as a great place for a hike.  The American West is a crazy quilt pattern of federal, private, and state land, with most places of recreational interest being federal, mostly National Forest and National Park Service lands but also some National Wildlife Refuges and BLM land as well. Lost Creek State Park is actually quite small, and it doesn’t take hiking for very long until you’re back in national forest land.   The park’s appeal is as a beautiful spot for camping and starting hikes in a steep-sided (glacially-carved, I’m guessing) canyon that looks a little like a smaller version of Yosemite Valley. There’s also a small waterfall.  With a fairly late start we managed to make it about three miles into the canyon from the trailhead on a gradually rising trail through the forest, a true walk in the woods.

Lost Creek State Park is only a few miles from Anaconda, sort of a little sister city to Butte in the region’s mining belt. Anaconda is similarly industrial and was where most of the copper or mined in Butte was smelted into metal. The smoke from the process created terrible air pollution, so a 585-foot tall smoke stack for the smelters was built high on a hill to spew the pollutants into the sky at a height that wouldn’t choke everyone at ground level.  The smelters closed in 1982 and the huge industrial complex below the smoke stack was dismantled, leaving some environmental devastation in the black slag heaps and a huge Superfund site extending northwards along the highly contaminated Clark’s Fork River, which is still undergoing remediation. The smoke stack itself was preserved from demolition as a state park, but that’s kind of an official designation. You’re not allowed to go through the remediation site to get anywhere near it except possibly on special tours run by ARCO which is cleaning it up.

Like Butte, Anaconda is a much smaller version of its former industrial self.  The town has some impressive brick public buildings dating from its industrial heyday over a century ago, including the City Hall and the Deer Lodge County Court House but overall a rather depressed ambience and no real attractions in town beyond the architecture. 

The Goosetown Gym in town was the nearest real gym to Fairmont Hot Springs so became the spot I returned several times through the week. During the day I had the place virtually to myself, hence my comfort in taking a few gym rat muscle pictures of myself in the mirror without any onlookers. I think my hard work over the last few months has paid off.  By evening there were a few more people at the gym, many of whom looked like they were seriously into powerlifting and worked at guards at the prison or in law enforcement.  It was humbling; I may feel strong and think I look muscular, but I’m still a weak, skinny guy by comparison to serious weightlifters.