Trout Creek Canyon, 3-25-16

Trout Creek Canyon is northeast of York on the east side of Hauser Reservoir. 

There are some incredibly interesting rock features, probably due to sedimentary layering.

And these layers had wonderful convolutions and folds!

The trail was still quite icy, but someone had been taking care of the winter deadfall.

And there were some ice free spots.

Everyone carried their own weight!

We learned a lot about winter and spring hiking...

...and that natural cathedrals exist even this far east of home.

The Road to Occidental Plateau

On an early March trip up to the Occidental Plateau south of Helena I ran across this excellent abandoned building.

It almost looks like an old Forest Service building, but its difficult to say.

It was wearing a nice fringe of icecicles....

It had a wonderful screened-in porch!

The chimney was a little worse for wear...

Hassel, MT

Moira, Jackson and I took a little trip up to find the Hassel, MT townsite.  There's till enough snow up there to make things pretty sloppy, so it was definitely 4-wheel drive territory.  This structure was the first obvious piece of what may have been the townsite that we came across.  

A short hike across the creek...

a nice muddy fall and a handful of stickerbush later...

Some details from the house and the car out front.  I'm not enough of an automotive officianato to identify the car, but I did get some detail shots...

Took some nice haunted house shots of the front of the building.  I may take it to black and white later!

There is a lot of what looks like dredge material along the creek, and there was a cabin nestled between this material and the hillside.  

And there was some really cool light inside!

I've been looking at Google Earth and there's a lot more to see in this area once the snow melts and the mud dries up a little!  More to come!

Lennep, MT

Moira and I took a little trip up toward White Sulpher Springs.  Our intention was to try to make it up to Castle Town, but the road was simply to deeply snow covered and we didn't want to get stuck up there with sketchy cell service, so that's a trip for a later date!  We did spend a little time in the little town of Lennep,  There are some inhabited houses and the church is still in use, but the rest of the actual town buildings appear abandoned, or at least are not being used as they were intended.

Trinity Lutheran Church, built in 1914.

View south of Lennep, just south of the Power Sub-Station below.

Old Power Sub-Station south of Lennep.  This has been replaced now by one of those sterile power forests surrounded by chain link and barbed wire, which sits just across the road.

One of the decaying little outbuildings around the Sub-Station.  

Hopefully we'll be able to walk around this site a bit more later on in the year.  I'd love to see it from different angles!