Garnet, Montana, United States
Wow! I’m onto my fourth road trip of the summer season
already. The way I look at it, when you
live in a place where summer is beautiful but short, you have to make best of
it. My plan for this trip is
northwestern Montana, essentially from Glacier National Park west to Idaho
border, focusing mostly on interesting hikes along with some sightseeing to the
extent that current plague conditions permit.
I’m heading via Missoula to check out the Montana city I’ve seen the
least of since I moved to the state and taking a somewhat indirect route via
Helena and MacDonald Pass rather than the Interstate. My impression from all the green on map (indicating
national forest) is that the country between Helena and Missoula through the
Blackfoot River Valley would be thickly forested. The reality of this
middle-of-nowhere is more of broad open valleys where ranching predominates.
The Ghost Town Scenic Byway is a short 20-mile trip over the
Garnet Range, a mostly east-west forested coverage range east of Missoula, that
is mostly BLM (that’s Bureau of Land Management, not Black Lives Matter)
territory.
The high country of the
Garnets was a gold mining region in late 1800s and early 1900s with several
towns. One of those is Coloma, now only the
ruined houses of what was a short-lived mining town. I learned that it was actually planned that
way. It was widely recognized at the time that most of those mining settlements
would be temporary until the ore ran out rather than permanent settlements, so
it was no surprise for most when they were abandoned after the underground riches
were depleted.
The main attraction along the byway is Garnet, one of best-preserved
ghost towns in Montana, with a fair number of buildings still standing,
although some have been lost to arson over the years. There’s a self-guided tour through the atmospheric
village in the woods near the high point of the range about 2,000 feet above
Clark Fork Valley on one side and the Blackfoot River Valley. I decided on the adventure route out, because
I can. While there’s a quite good gravel
road to Garnet from the north, the descent south to I-90 is mostly on one-lane
road with precipitous drop-offs and few turnouts. Luckily, I didn’t cross paths
with any other vehicles on the hairy parts.
2025-05-22