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Newsletter from Montana
November 2004
I was adding a link to our local high school to my list of Charities and found a little java script, which I just had to add to my
Comments page - now a bunch of stars will bounce along with your mouse
Scroll to the bottom to see how my 18 year old daughter sees the efforts of her mom ...
Our school district here is in the top 10% in the nation, regarding SAT scores and other statistics.
Many people were wondering from which states my clients travel to buy real estate in Montana, so I made a new page:
I counted 16 states
besides Montana. I am going to mount a map at the office where visitors can put a pin in the city of their origin. Since I had well over 100 visitors this summer this will be fun to see.
I do have some new listings that might be of interest to you. The first one is a
log home - with 9" logs and Swedish Finish, which keeps the logs light and bright - on 20 forested acres only 40 miles from Billings and about an hour from Red Lodge with Yellowstone River Access
All appliances are new and the workmanship is impeccable with a 500 sqft Tex Deck overlooking a sea of pine trees all the way to the Beartooth Mountain Range. Hot water radiant heat for comfort, but also equipped with a high efficient wood burning stove. $ 248,000
The owners found a job in Bozeman and have to leave their dream home. The whole basement and garage have in-floor radiant heat and the main level has baseboard, but those are hardly being used due to a very efficient wood stove with a catalyst and blowers. The house is very well built, from the thicker than normal foundation with extensive re-rod to the oak dowels fitted through each log but joint half way into the log below it. The inside chinking is "big stretch" which is capable of expanding and contracting to 50% of the original bead. The inside wood has two coats of Scandinavian Tung Oil and sealed with a urethane. The owners started resealing the outside this year, it does require re-sealing every 4-5 years to maintain the natural log look. The inside ceiling boards are actual 2x4 dimensional lumber with 4" Corbond Insulation sprayed on top of them. The builder lives just a couple of miles down the road from the house, so it will be easy to get any other questions answered.
Then we have 20 acres bordering 3.2 million acres of forest,
mountains and park land - off the grid.
All the wild life of the area will be blowing steam at your doorstep, including moose and elk $ 140,000
The property consists of two hillsides with a valley filled with Aspen and Douglas Fir trees. Either hillside has a stunning close-up view of the mountains.
Another pretty 20 acres piece is this one. The homesite is surrounded by trees in two coulees, you have views of the Clark's Fork Valley, the Hart Mountain of Cody and some of the Beartooth. Only 47 miles from Billings, and 25 miles from Red Lodge. Electric and phone are on the property and a Bobcat made its home there, but he will probably move out, he does not like neighbors.
They even allow manufactured homes on a permanent foundation $ 44,000 One neighbor works at the radio station in Billings, the president of the Homeowners association works as an engraver out of his home, one family raises horses, and those are all I got to meet so far.
The Hart Mountain is a piece of the Beartooth range, but with a gigantic explosion was catapulted to its present location and supposedly traveled at 70 mph. I talked to a geologist and she explained to me that our Beartooth Mountains are not just a crumpled up mess, but a gigantic glob of Granite rose from the bottom of the earth through the top crust and now sits there as the highest peak in Montana and is called.... Granite Peak. When the chunk of granite floated to the top, it put the earth crust on end, hence the ocean floor that sticks out like plates on a back of a dinosaur. Who says you cannot have an ocean view in Montana? All the other sedimentary rock has weathered away, mainly because we had 4 ice ages on top of the Beartooth, which left it with over 1,000 lakes and some glaciers for decoration. Most of the foothills are very old landslides.
All this shifting left Red Lodge and the area east of it with a nice deposit of coal, which was mined at the turn of the last century. I went to the museum and looked at some of the mineshaft maps, which are as big and thick as carpets and of course handwritten. Red Lodge looks likes an ant farm. They did not mine the coal toward the north, because there it was too close to the surface, but south of town are mineshafts for three miles out to the west and at an average of 1,000 feet deep in town. The town of Red Lodge had started out with some small wooden buildings in the south part of town around 17th street, but because of the mining in that area, downtown was moved and the nice brick buildings you see today along Broadway were built at the beginning of 1900. Of course there are no mineshafts under the Hi-Bug district either, where the Big Wigs of that time built their homes and this whole district is now on the National Register of Historic Places. There is a book available at the museum, describing the history of some of the homes there. We own one of the colonial revivals there and did all the reviving, which inspired two neighbors to put new siding on their homes, another house is getting a new foundation and a fourth added a huge porch with columns. Looks like we started something. What fascinated me, was that I ordered English wallpaper and when I wallpapered the dining room, I did not have a single scrap left over. I am wondering if the English architects designed the room dimensions in wallpaper increments? The foremen and all other important positions at that time where filled by English speaking immigrants, such as people from England, Ireland and Scotland. The rest of the workers came from just about every country in Europe and the Big Wigs liked it that way, because of the language difference they would not get together and form unions....
The mineshafts start south of 13th Street, go out west for three miles and stay west of the old train tracts. The mineshafts on the east side also start at 13th street and go east all the way to Belfry with much larger cavities. When the train tracts were removed in the late 1970's, it resulted in a big diagonal open space through town. That is where all the newer buildings are such as the schools, grocery and hardware store, civic center, etc. Where the senior center now stands was a huge mill that received the output of the mine shafts on the hillside directly behind it The spacious entrance to the west mines was taken up by the present hospital.
Near the old train station used to be an underground mule corral. They kept the mules below ground all their lives; it was a major ordeal to get the mules there in the first place. They made the mule fast for three days - they were without food and water, so the bladder would not rupture and there was no danger of suffocation when they lowered them into the mine shafts. The legs of the animal were tied to the body and it got wrapped up like a package for the trip underground via a sky hook, or similar contraption. The holding hook was built in such a manner as to place the mule diagonal in the shaft compartment. This was necessary because of the small compartment size.
The mines in Red Lodge were closed around the 1920's The east side of Red Lodge all the way over to Belfry has larger cavities and sink holes are more frequent. The sink holes do not amount to much, though, because we are on a terminal moraine and are sitting mostly on round glacier gravel and sedimentary landslides, which fill cavities easily and nicely. Not like in Florida where you have sinkholes in Limestone and those are getting bigger every time you look at them. Also we have a lot of water flowing out of the mountains and most mineshafts are filled with water. Even while the mines were in operation, they needed huge water pumps to keep the shafts from filling up with water. I talked to another geologist about it and he told me that the water probably has softened the sides of the mineshafts and chances are that most of them are already filled with the surrounding gravel.
There used to be a sawmill in Red Lodge to cut the lumber for the support structures of the mines. They floated the logs down Rock Creek and into a mill pond, from which
my $ 2,000,000 listing was created.
There was also a guardhouse, making sure nobody was snagging the logs.
My list of charities is getting longer and so I added some fun links from my personal page into the left margin.
You might want to buy your Christmas cards, pens or magnets from a company that employs handicapped people
Exclusively. They have been in business for 26 years and employ about 100 to 120 handicapped and senior citizens. If you know of a handicapped or disabled artist interested in selling their artwork, you might want to give them this email address: marketing@thasc.com
In Germany toward the end of November, the dead are being honored and remembered. I ran across a company that manufactures diamonds out of the carbon found in human ashes. So if you have a loved one you want to remember in a special way... they will need 8 ounces of ashes to make a quarter carat yellow diamond. The company is called LifeGems and is based in suburban Chicago. Three-year-old LifeGems
has crafted nearly 1,000 of the diamonds - what it calls "the most unique memorial product ever invented" - for about 500 families. Rather than having ongoing mourning for someone's loss, people rather celebrate a life. The LifeGem is just another way to do that, versus having a weeping, somber occasion. Prices vary from about $2,500 for a quarter carat to about $14,000 for a full carat. It does take a few months for the process and the cremains are subjected to the extremes of heat and pressure. The resulting diamond then is cut and faceted like a normal diamond.
Beyond the synthetic diamonds, others in recent years have tried to think outside the box when it comes to options with cremains. Creative Cremains -
based in California, long the nation's largest cremation state by volume - offers custom-designed urns, converting mementos - everything from sports equipment to photo frames and musical instruments - into places for loved one's ashes.
"The only limits are imagination and finances," the company's Web site says.
Not to be outdone, Georgia-based Eternal Reefs Inc. has catered to people who in life honored the environment, mixing their cremains into concrete and placing them in the water off any of several states, creating new marine habitats for fish and other sea life.
Other businesses will send cremains into space or place them in fireworks for folks who want to go out with a bang.
Well, let's not go out with a bang, but with a song
I wish you a happy month of December and hope you can celebrate Christmas in the manner you like best!
:-)
Best Regards,
Dorothea Lowe, Broker
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