Bozeman Trails

August 2-3

It is a short drive from Livingston to Bozeman, mostly on Interstate 90. We are in another plain surrounded by mountains.

Bozeman has about 40,000 people, making it is the biggest town we’ve seen since we left Cheyenne. 

We got into town with plenty of time for mostly boring, but necessary stuff: Blood test, Rx refills, dropping off dry cleaning, taking a nap, running a couple of washer loads at a laundromat.

I had booked us into an independent motel, which is always a craps shoot. Actually many motels are. 

I’ve learned on this trip that you can count on Motel 6, though. It is consistently bad. The towels are like sand paper and the franchise is too cheap to give you a packet of shampoo.

Super 8, another inexpensive brand, is all over the place. Some are run down and literally moldy, but the one in Livingston was very good. It was clean and bright, and even provided a reasonable breakfast. It’s more like what I expect at La Quinta or Hampton Inn.

The Rainbow Motel in Bozeman is near the bottom of the list. Maybe a short step above the Motel 6 in Jackson. The room has a funny smell. The wi-fi is usually unavailable. When it works, it can be too slow to use e-mail. (I’m in Starbucks, right now.)

There was a guy sitting outside not far from our door.

He has stringy hair down to his shoulders and a cowboy walrus moustache. Joanna and I were both wearing light color clothes and straw hats. He said we looked like twins. 

Given the bare-bones simplicity of the property here, when I first saw him sitting stock still on a bench outside his door, I figured this was a welfare hotel and he was on county relief.

Not so, though. He asked where we were going to eat. We said we didn’t know yet. He gave us a couple of suggestions. One was a brewery, and my experience in Livingston taught me that the breweries stop serving at eight and are supposed to close at nine.

So the man shared a recommendation that he got from one of the ladies at the Rainbow office. There is a place called Cat’s Paw not far up the road. 

Dinner was surprisingly hard to find. Cat’s Paw, a block away on North 7th Avenue, was closed. So we tried to find the Club Tavern, farther up the avenue. We had the number of the address, taken from the Yellow Pages directory, but couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s closed or operating under a new name.

We went to a place called Old Chicago. The name suggested a steakhouse to me, but it had no steak. I had a burger. Joanna had a salad with chicken.

The big thing there is pizza, so maybe they make it Chicago style, in a pan with thick crust. 

They did have a good range of craft beer. I had a couple of tasty IPAs with some fragrance.

On the way home, I picked up a six-pack of Big Sky IPA, which is also good. Like most of the IPAs made up here, it is short on hop aroma, but the body and bitterness are both satisfying. 

Wednesday morning we had breakfast with the welfare cowboy.

The motel, as many do, lays out cold cereal, pastry, and coffee each morning. Joanna and I took ours to a picnic table. We saw the cowboy out to get coffee. 

He asked, so I told him about the Cat’s Paw, and then he joined us.

His name is Sonny, and he grew up in Bozeman. He actually had a ranch, and has experience raising cows and horses. I believe he said the ranch was in Wyoming. He lives in Albuquerque now and had driven up for his 50th high school reunion.

He is full of stories, and some of them may be true. His parents sent him to a private school out of state for his senior year of school, to get his grades up so he could go to college.

He was a bronc rider for the Montana State U. rodeo team. When the school told him that he couldn’t just ride broncs and drink, but had to go to classes, too, he quit.

He has caps in the window of his car for the First Cavalry and the Bronze Star. He says he earned three Bronze Stars in Vietnam.

We went to the Museum of the Rockies in the afternoon. We spent an hour or so at the farm exhibit next to the museum building. 

It includes a two-story log house built around 1890. Montana State University, which operates the museum, hauled it in a single piece from its original site about 45 miles away in Willow Creek, Montana.

The interior is furnished in period furniture, but pieces not original to the house. 

A man named Tinsley became a homesteader out here to get away from Missouri during the Civil War. There is a replica of a one-room cabin the family lived in for 20 years. They had eight children.

The farm has a kitchen garden using heirloom seeds for authenticity.

We saw corn growing in the garden. The gardener, who may teach at the university, told us the heirloom corn is hit or miss.

Summers can be too chilly to yield a crop some years. Same is true for the tomatoes. The nights are often too cold for the fruit to form.

He said he tends his own home garden where he grows corn and tomatoes, but they are hybrid strains developed for climates like Montana's. They were unavailable in the 1890s.

For lunch, we went to Bridger Brewing. All they serve there is pizza and great beer. I had a pint of a black IPA called Antilogy. I just discovered that’s a real word, meaning “contradiction in terms.” 

Lots of malt and lots of hops contradicting each other.

We told Sonny we’d see him around four and walk to Main Street. The evening was the start of an annual event called the Sweet Pea Festival and would be devoted to food. 

All along the stroll downtown Sonny reminisced about what used to be where. 

The Rocking R Bar really surprised him. Didn’t look at all as he recalled it.

That, we learned later, is because about seven years ago a gas main leak ignited and blew up the entire block. Sonny said the place used to open at 7 a.m. for the bar-flies. It’s a bit more upscale now.

We sat next to Ralph, who was wearing a collar pin with Rocking R in rhinestones. He has been the owner of the place since 1978. Or maybe that’s ’88. I’m not sure now.

He showed us photos on the wall of the building after it blew up. 

The street was filled with stalls by various groups—local restaurants, Knights of Columbus—all offering samples of food. Joanna saw a man eating a turkey leg and asked where she could get one.

I was still stuffed from pizza for lunch. So I had few bites of turkey, which was very tasty and tender. The dark meat is always the best part of the bird.

I had so many different beers that they sort of run together in my memory. Every one was good, and most were from breweries I hadn’t heard of before.

I guess, all in all, Bozeman is my kind of town.

Be well, all.

Harry