Still in Montana?

 It was time to leave Bearmouth area and head southeast, a bit past Bozeman Montana. The drive would have been prettier if there was no smoke covering the hills and mountains. Driving through the haze had me wondering if this is what it would like after the rapture. All this beauty around us, hidden under a haze, hiding that beauty.

We arrived at our next stop in Livingston Montana. This campground is privately owned and well cared for... the city road to it is not, not a deterrent though.

It is very well organized so that one's arrival experience is not stressful. The RVer pull in to the left, marked "enter"; go in the office and registers; escorted to assigned site; assisted in back-in or pull through. If there are RVing dogs, they have a dog run for their pleasure. For humans there are showers, laundry, and a half basketball court. Like all great campgrounds, the train is about 1/4 mile away running next to the highway.

With our day of rest in the past we went out to investigate the area. We started in Bozeman at Museum of the Rockies (museumattherockies.org). 

The museum isn't just about dinosaurs, there is a section capturing regional history, and information presentations. Some exhibits were closed for renovations, others off limits due to COVIDS-19, it was still an interesting stroll through the museum.

Growth Chart of Triceratops (youth to adult)

Civil War Cannon

Water Wagon (circa late 1800's)

Gloves made of Bear Skin

We ate our lunches we brought with us. Our next stop was a distillery called "Wildrye". These guys make their spirits out of corn that is locally grown. Their stuff was great enough that we bought four bottles: gin, bourbon, dark rum, and an apple pie cider. You want a bottle: wildryedistilling.com.

The next day we took a drive back to Bozeman for a bit more sightseeing at sculpture park, and a computer and robotics museum. On the way back up the highway we stopped at Grizzly Bear Adventure (grizzlyencounter.org), a rescue facility for grizzly bears.

The facility currently has five rescued bears, the youngest rescue was only about two months old, their oldest bear is "Buster" somewhere around six years. The bears are out one at a time because they are a lot like Democrats and Republicans, they don't get along. The bear in the photos is "Max".

It's OK, she's not in Danger

Back to the sculpture park. The park is actually a two mile walking path with sculptures on each side, needless to say, we didn't walk the whole trail. As you look at the sculptures, ask yourself, would I pay up to $30,000.00 for this sculpture.

$30,000.00

$23,000.00

The least expensive sculpture I found was $13,500.00.

Not sure if this is a sculpture.

We burned enough time, so we headed to the museum. The museum brought back memories of owning some of the contraptions on display. The journey begins way back with the Babylonians and their cypher... and screams it's way to todays technology. One of the first computers was built in a building that was a city block in size... not your real desk top model.

I found the Enigma exhibit fascinating. For those that don't know what an enigma machine is, it was the Germans form of encrypting messages. The United States managed to gain access to one when they sunk one of Germany's U-boats.

The encryption codes for the enigma machine were changed daily in accordance with the key sheet. The technician setting up the daily encryption needed to be very careful when moving the jumpers on the machine because the other side would be translating the message using the same encryption code.

The way the machine works is when a letter is typed, a light lights up the new letter, a person is copying the lit letters, then sends out the message using the new letters. The receiving side gets the message, types in the letters from the message, lights light the original letters... the message is now just like when it was dictated.

Remember I mentioned something about a desk top computer? Well let me show you what it looked like:

PDP-8 Desk Top Computer

The museum has one of the computers from the Apollo 11 mission. 

How's this for a space saver computer, and it has 32 Kilobytes of RAM (Random Access Memory)... only weighs 1,000 pounds.

Technology has come a long way though. Someone out there from 1965 bragging about their 8 Megabyte of storage? how big was your computer? This disk is the size of a giant pizza measuring about 30 inches across.

No, this is not a gold record, it was 8 Megabytes of storage in 1965. Say you would like a Terabyte of storage, it would only take 125,000 of these disks... and your good.

Or you could have waited until 2011 for one of these:

So much nicer to be able to put this hard drive in your computer, vice buying a house to mount your 125,000 storage disks.

For you gamers out there, you are not forgotten. This museum has the first Odyssey video game system:

Then there was next generation:

There were many other exhibits to see ranging from quantum theory to DNA. The oddest one was a display about the brain size of an ant. Someone took time to dissect an ant.

Bozeman will be a return visit in the future, there is still more to see.

The home was originally built in 1886 from a set of mail order plans John Mendenhall. John came to the area in 1864 failing as a gold miner, he became a merchant. He was the county's first elected sheriff. After he died in 1896, his wife and son continued to live at the residence. His son Sam became Bozeman's first City Manager. Sam also owned and operated the Bozeman electric company and street railway. The house was sold several times, finally to Malcom Story, the grandson of Bozeman founder Nelson Story.

Our plans for the next day were to take a scenic drive through part of Yellowstone, but the weather was very windy and rainy. The nice part about the rain was a short time without smoke.

The next time you read this we will have moved on to Wyoming.