30B430 #19

For a few weeks, Bailie and I had been planning on heading up ti Idaho City but when she spent too much time with friends one weekend, I called Niki up to see if, last minute, she was interested in coming with me instead. In exchange for some coffee, she agreed and we drove away from Boise towards Idaho City, driving along some beautiful scenery, deep valleys, increasingly wooded hills, and evening arrived at Idaho City. Idaho City is an old mining town that still has many of the original buildings, and is also home to a remarkable cemetery about a mile and a half outside of town. We didn’t really have an agenda, so we just wandered the town, looking at the old building fronts, the old courthouse, the municipal building, and lots of little stores. Everyone was incredibly friendly- and sometimes a little too friendly. The museum was small but had some great hings, including an old phonograph, some old guns, old school equipment, and the most fantastically awful little video about the town. And when I saw fantastically awful, think the video at the beginning of the Museum of Oxford. Katie and Marsaili know exactly what I’m talking about. We were also able to wander inside the old penitentiary, which was much smaller than the Old Pen in Boise, and peek into what will one day, with enough funds, be the Chinese Museum, as apparently there was a large Chinese population that were integral in keeping the mining town afloat during the late 19^th and early 20^th century. 

 As we were in one of the old little general stores getting some ice cream, two people ran in, dressed in old-timey garb, and stole  some money from the cashier. I was personally worried about my ice cream melting. We headed back outside to find a little show in progress- think Williams, AZ, or Knott’s Berry Farm, when you’re on the train and you get robbed. It was pretty adorable but certainly not high brow theatre.

Before heading home, we stopped in at the old cemetery. There usually is a brochure with details about who was buried there but the cemetery was popular at the time and there weren’t any brochures to be had. So we just wandered throughout the paths, looking at the different plots and headstones, enjoying the interested epithets and the funny names,  my favorite being “Umphrey.” Not Humphrey, just Umphrey.

The last time I had been in the Idaho City area, we stopped just before the city and went ot the Hot Springs. The weather we went was just beautiful and I’m glad that we had the opportunity to wander and explore before things got busy.