Confederate Gulch

 Canyon Ferry Lake, Montana

 There aren't many big lakes in Montana. We've been camping on Canyon Ferry Lake, which was formed when the Missouri River was dammed up near Helena.  We traveled around the lake yesterday and saw a large number of lovely campgrounds that had been created by the Federal Bureau of Reclamation (which neither of us had ever heard of before yesterday.

The Missouri River officially starts at the confluence of the Jefferson and Madison in Missouri Headwaters State Park near Three Forks, Montana, and is joined by the Gallatin a mile downstream. The Missouri then passes through Canyon Ferry Lake,  west of the Big Belt Mountains. The river flows northeast to the city of Great Falls, where it drops over the Great Falls of the Missouri, a series of five waterfalls. It then winds east through a scenic region of canyons and badlands known as the Missouri Breaks.

 

 We went into Helena yesterday to see Brad Pitt in "World War Z", which we both thought was a passable Zombie movie. These were the fast-moving type Zombies. which are always more exciting than the slow, shambling Zombies.....but even if you shoot these in the head and burn them to a crisp, they still wiggle their fingers.....

We also saw "Big Medicine" or what was left of him at the Montana Historical Museum....he was the one in five million "white buffalo" born in 1933 and died in 1958...he was stuffed...at the time of his birth much was made of the portent....

So where were we?....Oh Yeah....Confederate Gulch....

 After the Confederate Army invaded Missouri from Arkansas, it disintegrated into a number of smaller dangerous bands like the James brothers and Cantrell's Raiders. Fighting them was a very dangerous business so the Union general in charge offered them a parole in 1864 if they would cease fighting and go northwest  up into Montana.....usually by riverboat....Confederate Gulch was formed by a small creek that now flows down into Canyon Ferry Lake. Four Confederate soldiers discovered in the gulch the richest per acre gold find ever recorded. At one point a single pan of gravel yielded seven pounds of gold worth $1,400 at $20 per ounce. There were descriptions of unguarded nail kegs full of gold and sluices made inoperable by being clogged with gold dust.

The gravel in the creek bed was eight to forty feet thick and about half gleaming gold dust and nuggets. Efforts to locate the mother lode were largely unsuccessful. Today the gulch is very quiet. It was once the largest town in Montana with about 10,000 miners. Today only a few timbers remain.
The picture below shows the intersection of Ambush Lane and Confederate Gulch Road....

A Taste for Flesh

Zombieland, USA

The movie was a tremendous disappointment.

One might expect moviemakers to treat the subject of Zombies with respect and constant action.

Some of the great recent Zombie flicks would include "Dawn of the Dead" and "Legend" with Will Smith. Legend had a nice twist with supercharged Zombies rather than shambling corpses.

Zombieland was filled with many long, boring periods of nothing happening and the Zombies were not treated with respect. They were too easy to kill and the overlay of attempted humor was heavy-handed.

Bill Murray made a cameo appearance. but failed to add much to the movie. Woody Harrelson overplayed his role, which seemed to have echos of his "Natural Born Killers" masterpiece.

I have high hopes that the movie in making, "World War Z", will treat the Zombie population with the respect and fear to which they are entitled. Abberations like "Shawn of the Dead" and "Zombieland" are a disgrace to the genre.

The finale in an amusement park was extremely stupid. Why would any rational person turn on the lights in an amusement park and attract every Zombie within a two mile radius?

Anyway, I'm still sorting though the 2009 pixs for the magical 13 to make up the Firecloud Calendar. My SIL is now on the mailing list.

I think the reason I like Zombie movies so much is that they offer simple solutions in contrast to the complex problems we don't know how to deal with. What do we do with AIDs, poverty, Zombie banks, the recession, unemployment, global warming, peak oil or nuclear waste storage? No Idea. Zombies present simple problems...just shoot them in the head.

Zombies have a much shorter literary tradition than vampires or werewolves. Nevertheless, "American Werewolf in London" had some great music and visual effects.

My favorite horror movie of all time was "Jacob's Ladder" a truly frightening movie in which you never realized until the end that the images and experiences you were seeing were in the dying mind of a wounded Vietnam soldier given an experimental battlefield drug by the government.

In the event of an actual Zombie outbreak, my M1 Carbine and a machete would be useful and preferred tools. The local press will attempt to cover up a Zombie outbreak initially. The latest documented Zombie outbreak occured in 2003 in St. Thomas, but it was only a class-2 outbreak, easily controlled and extinguished by Homeland Security.


There are many simple things you can do to prepare for a Zombie outbreak. For example, I have in my Zombie kit a SCUBA wetsuit I can wear which is nearly bite proof as well as leather motorcycle gloves and a crash helmet with a visor. The important thing is to present as small a bite opportunity as possible.