By H.G. Klemms

Last week I walked into a town full of ghosts. Just a few years ago it was a bustling mining town, full of life and activity. Now it is a town where one walks with ghosts, more than 80 of them - ghosts of men who went one day into the depths of the mine and came out not again, until they were brought limp, and dead upon the shoulders of their relatives.

The town is Bear Creek, and it made one's heart go wry to see what has happened to the town since. I had already learned that many people had moved to Red Lodge, Billings and other places after the disaster. I had also been told of many houses that had been moved from the stricken town to other communities. When I drove into the little village it was worse than I anticipated. Buildings boarded up, gaunt basements yawning at the roadside emptiness and desolation on all hands. Only the school building looked thrifty and neat, and the flag flew proudly from the mast. There were not two or three other buildings that looked well-kept and prosperous. It was a town where ghosts walked, and the spirit of the town itself was one of them.

How did it die? Well, mining is a hazardous occupation, and even with the best preventative measures fearful accidents can and do happen. When the greed of mine owners prevents the installation of necessary safety devices and political indifference permits the neglect, then the stage is set for disaster. Then come the fearful tidings, and wives and mothers and sweethearts and children come with hands clutching at their throat to the smoking pit. I have seen them, and there is no more harrowing a scene that the long wait writing its slow agony on the faces of the waiting ones. Then come the sheeted corpses, the word of identification is passed, and a long wail rises from a huddled group to one side.

"Once upon a time," about 50 million years ago to be a little more specific, molten lava poured forth from cracks in the earth and from volcanic cones to flood the entire region between Bozeman and Yellowstone National Park, the region now known as the Gallatin Range. At that time, this area was ruggedly mountainous but of lower overall elevation, and it had a more tropical climate.

As lavas filled the valleys and spread over the hilltops, they cooled and cracked in paces into vertical columns. At Palisade Falls in Hyalite Canyon, one of these columnar lava flows can now be seen where recent erosion has cut into it and exposed it along the canyon walls. Grotto Falls and Arch Falls are other locations where present-day stream waters tumble across exposures of these ancient lava flows.

Individual tongues or flows of lava reached many tens of feet in thickness, though many were thinner. The tops of individual flows tend to be marked by reddish, rubbly zones where the crusted surface of the lava, loaded with trapped gas bubbles, cracked up as it floated along on the flow. Sequences of flows one on another may be picked out in the canyon walls of Upper Squaw Creek, West Fork of Hyalite Canyon, Hyalite Lake, Mount Blackmore, and many other places.