travel dates July 2022
Our original plan called for us to spend a couple of nights in Great Falls after leaving Glacier, check out Lewis and Clark stuff and all that. But I got very nervous looking at a map of our route east after Great Falls, which included a long stretch on “the Loneliest Highway in America” (i.e. hwy 200. It looks like a lot of places claim to be home to the loneliest highway in America, really, but I bet the one in Montana has a pretty good claim to it). The forecast was also calling for extreme heat, which seemed bad both for breaking down on the Loneliest Highway in American in our 20 year old van AND for doing all the outside stuff we had planned in Great Falls. So we opted to take the more northerly, slightly less lonely route (although still pretty lonely) on hwy 2 to Havre, MT, where I remembered reading about a very cool (both figuratively and literally) sounding “Havre Beneath the Streets” tour.
The Great Northern Fair just happened to be going on when we were passing through Havre. We were initially excited about checking it out but eventually decided it was just too hot, even in the evening, and skipped it. But we did do the Beneath the Streets tour!
An early 20th century fire destroyed much of downtown Havre, and local businesses moved underground and kept operating in an interconnected system of basements while reconstruction went on up above. Today they’ve recreated many of the businesses–brothels, butchers, barbershops, and more!–and it operates as a tourist attraction.
Once you go underground, you don’t come back up again until the end of the tour, so it was indeed a great very hot day activity. And the history was really interesting. Havre was founded as a railroad town, and the tour is as much just a glimpse into life in a turn of the century western railroad town as anything else–the fact that it’s all in basements is just a bonus.
You get lots of colorful anecdotes from the town and go through lots of cool passageways. The tour was on the wordy side for 8 year old Abe, but he hung in there. Our guide was Native American, so it was especially interesting to hear her perspective on the town and larger area and on how things have changed over time.
And that’s it for this post about this brief stopover. We were supposed to spend two nights in Havre, but we decided to break up the long drive to Theodore Roosevelt National Park (up next!) by leaving early and doing an overnight stop on the way.
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