One of the great things about traveling with Bert & Janie is that they bring us to places we’d be unlikely to visit otherwise. Case in point: Bannack, Montana. It’s so far off the beaten path and not on the way to much that we probably would have passed it by.

Bannack is a ghost town, the best I’ve ever seen. Once a gold rush town and the territorial capital of Montana, it has managed to escape becoming either a tourist trap like Tombstone AZ or a collection of dried-up ruins like so many Nevada settlements. The state made it a state park and thus Bannack is preserved and free from commercial inflammation.

For RV’ers, Bannack is an excellent stop because there are two small and tranquil state park campgrounds a short 1/4 mile walk from the townsite. These campgrounds are small, and border Grasshopper Creek (more on that in a moment). The sites are grassy and open, occasionally shaded by cottonwood trees, and have a expansive view of the surrounding mountains. There are no hookups, no cell phone service, no amenities of any kind, and no dump station, but for $10 ($6 for Montana seniors) it’s well worth a stay.

WordPress (the new blog software we’re using now) does not allow me to upload the Google Earth placemarks that I used to insert into the blog from time to time.   But here’s the Lat/Long for the campground we visited in Bannack State Park: 45 ° 9’54.12″N, 113 ° 0’16.66″W.   You can plug that into Google Earth (or any other mapping program) and see the location.   The ghost town is just east of the campground.

Two days before in Virginia City I bought a book by Dorothy M Johnson called “The Bloody Bozeman.” It’s about the creation and history of the Bozeman Trail. The book starts in the historical epicenter of Montana in 1862 — Bannack — and describes not only the gold rush that started on the banks of the Grasshopper Creek and resulted in the founding of Bannack, but the surrounding stories of battles with the Sioux Indians, survival in the western wilderness, and the marauding “Road Agents” who operated between Bannack and Virginia City.

There’s nothing like reading these tales while I’m camped in the exact spot where they happened. It’s spooky enough to walk through the open dirt street of Bannack and look at all the empty buildings … but quite a bit spookier to have the stories of John Bozeman and Red Bear, Jim Bridger and “Clubfoot” George Ives fresh in my mind as I see the land where they once rode, shot, and died.

Up the hill from town is the gallows. It’s not much to see — a simple arrangement of poles, like field goal. But on the short hike up, you can imagine you’re going up to witness the hanging of Henry Plummer, leader of a gang of road agents, who said when finally caught and arrested that he was “too evil to die.” On the gallows high on the hill above Bannack, Plummer asked for one last favor: “Give me a good drop” so that he would die quickly.

This is antelope season. Although hunting isn’t allowed in the state park, many of our neighbors in the campground seem to be hunters who use the park as a base of operations. In the evening the results of one successful hunt were seen swinging from a tree next to our campsite … an eery reminder of the men who swung from the gallows just a quarter-mile away.

In the evening Emma challenged Bert to a game of checkers. No slouch at checkers or chess, Bert gave her a run for her money and eventually defeated her. I think perhaps my threat to mention in the blog that he was beaten by a 7-year-old put him on his best game. Then Emma challenged me and beat me handily due to my failure to see two double-jumps coming.

Tonight we are on our own up, about 90 minutes north, near Butte. Bert & Janie have gone on ahead to their home in northern Montana, and we’ve stopped at Fairmont Hot Springs Resort to have a swim in their hot water pools. The resort has giant indoor and outdoor pools (two each, running 92-94 and 102-104 degrees), and a huge five-story tall water slide. After all the cold weather we’ve seen lately, this seemed like the right stop to make.

Fairmont Hot Springs RV Resort:   46 ° 2’31.89″N, 112 °48’23.77″W.