National Park
- Glacier National Park
- Glacier National Park borders on Canada, and gets its name from the fact that many of the landscapes were formed by glacial action, not necessarily because of the few small glaciers that still remain to this day.
[Top]National Forest
- Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest
- Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest is home to the Pioneer Mountains. There's a scenic byway leading through them, and a number of scenic viewpoints; as well as the ghost town of Coolidge.
[Top]National Battlefield
- Big Hole National Battlefield
- Big Hole National Battlefield marks the point where about 750 Nez Perce Indians were attacked by soldiers and civilian volunteers on August 9 and 10, 1877. The Nez Perce had fled to Montana Territory in an attempt to escape from being moved into a reservation.
[Top]State Parks
- Bannack State Park
- Bannack was Montana's first territorial capital. Nowadays, it's a well-preserved ghost town that is kept in a state of "arrested decay" (similar to Bodie Ghost Town in California) where buildings are prevented from falling down, but no measures are taken to transform the town into something it never was.
- Granite Ghost Town State Park
- Granite is a small ghost town, four miles on gravel road outside of Philipsburg, Montana.
[Top]Other
- Beartooth Highway
- Beartooth Highway is also known as Highway 212. It's located along the Montana-Wyoming border, and reaches 10,350 and 10,947 feet respectively, making it the highest elevation highway in the Northern Rockies. When I visited in 2005, the higher portions were closed due to multiple rock slides.
- Berkeley Pit
- If you were to fall into the water that has filled a big part of this former open mining pit, you'd meet very high concentrations of aluminum, copper, cadmium, cobalt, iron, manganese, zinc, arsenic and sulfate; and water that is about as acidic as vinegar. The bottom of the pit is an an elevation of 4,263 feet, the water level is at around 5,243 feet and still rising.
- Butte, MT
- Butte is a city of about 34,000 people in Southwest Montana. It used to be a booming mining town (mostly copper), between the late 19th century and the 1920s, with a peak of 115,000 inhabitants in 1910.
- Nevada City, MT
- What used to be one of the largest of the nine gold camps along Alder Gulch in the 19th century is now a "haven for endangered" structures, with over ninety buildings from across Montana being moved here since the Sixties.
