The brink of winter

I know it has been too long since I last blogged, but we have just been forging ahead. Keith with classes in full swing and me working a little and hiking as much as the weather will allow. Which is not much. Here are a few things we have been working on before the snows hit even harder. Painting trim, building new kitchen walls, and Lucy does a great job of gazing toward the East Ridge mountains longingly.

We a had warm weekend a the weekend before last (50s!). And since then we have had cold and snow. What else should I expect? It's October for crying out loud. The middle of winter in Butte!

Here are a few around town views (in Walkerville, a small enclave that is the north part of Butte). The metal scaffolding looking things are headframes and they dot the Butte landscape. Headframes were the old way down into the mines, before they started strip mining here. Each headframe had an elevator that carried the miners down into the pit at the beginning of each shift and up from the mine at the end. If you saw Butte, America last week on PBS there was a lot of footage about the mines and headframes. They still stand as a testimony to Butte heritage. Butte's history is a lot more interesting than its apparent future. I keep asking people in town, "What is the future of this town?" and the response is usually a hope tied up in a company coming here to provide jobs or renew the economy. Butte is such an interesting place and I often feel like I am at pep rally for the Titanic. I don't mean that harshly, and I realize that this is a special place to the 35,000 or so people who call Butte home. Anyhow, come to your own conclusions. No matter what this is an interesting place like no where I have been before.

Butte landscapes.

Keith succumbs to the cold. Lucy tries to help.

Snow, snow, snowier

The snow is deep at 8,000 feet. See how Lucy's legs are all the way covered in the the snow!
These pictures are from Sunday's hike 1 hour northwest of Butte.We were hiking up to Barker Lake and an hour into our hike our sneakers were soaked and we realized we were too poorly prepared to make the hike in what was becoming 12 + inches of perfect powder snow.

Tonight the temps are forecasted to be 17 degrees F! While I ran today in the wind and snow, I counted the months until warmer weather: 8 months. It snowed last May when Keith was finishing finals. I also counted the days until I get to savor the NC mountains: 74 days.

Let me remind you what it looked like just last weekend when I wore shorts to go hiking north of Butte near Moulton reservoir.

So, what has Keith been doing besides playing with me in the snow and trails of SW Montana? He had an interview a few weeks ago for a summer internship. We should find out this week what we will be doing next summer. A lot of Tech students are feeling uneasy only because there are few internships for a burgeoning Petro Engineer class. MTech enrolled an additional 500 students this fall, which doesn't sound large, but it is a 50% growth compared to last semester. Makes you wonder what the world will do with all the new engineers coming out of their programs in the next 1-2 years.

I am currently hunkering down for the winter. We need some good Southern food, so Chicken-n-Dumplings are on the teal stove and we will get wrapped up in our warm jackets for a nice winter's evening. Stay warm.