Lewistown, Montana, United States
After 10 days on the road in the eastern Outback, I made an
early morning decision to head for home on Memorial Day rather than head down another
rough road in search of an extreme social distancing hike. I made a brief stop
in Zortman, a so-called ghost town in the Little Rockies, the easternmost of
the so-called island ranges of eastern Montana that are surrounded by the
plains. The isolated range was the first one seen by the Lewis & Clark
party on their voyage west in 1805. It was a rich mining region in gold rush
times, and there’s still a commercial mine in the area. As far as ghost towns go, Zortman isn’t much.
The town is a living one with a few decaying old miner’s shacks and a quaint
jail.
The central part of Montana is the part of the state I have
not been to the longest, my last time being a road trip through in 1998. The landscape
south of the Missouri River is relatively high elevation and includes several
of the island ranges, including the Big Snowy Mountains. Lewistown, with about 6,000 population, is
the county seat of Fergus County and the town closest to the geographic
midpoint of the state.
Although there’s not much of touristic interest, I find
it to be an especially appealing town because of its location in a high plains
valley between two mountain ranges and the historic buildings that line its Main
Street. It seems like a place that used to be much bigger and more prominent,
one that hasn’t grown much, as evidenced by a significant downtown historic
district and little in the way of post-WWII type sprawl surrounding it.
Harlowton, seat of Wheatland County, is the next significant
town on the way home. Located along the Musselshell River and farther from the
nearest mountains, the Crazy Range, it has a somewhat more down-and-out feel to
it, definitely Wild West in its appearance. I’m sure I will be back through central
Montana, though, since it looks like there are some good hikes in the island
ranges, late May still being too snow packed for hiking them
2025-05-22