We have wrapped up our last day in Montana. We fly home on Saturday.

We started the day at the Smokejumper Visitor Center, near the Missoula airport. Smokejumpers are federal employees whose job is to parachute near active forest fires to control spread of otherwise uncontrollable fires. Missoula has the largest smokejumper training school in the country, and the Center maintains both a museum and  gives tours of smokejumper equipment.

Smokejumpers are trained in fighting and control of forest fires, must be able to parachute into wild country, and carry 100+ pound packs for miles. And you can’t just decide to become a smokejumper. You must already have years of firefighting experience. With all of this, two facts struck me as remarkable. First, 20% of smokejumpers are female. Second, in over 85 years of smokejumping, there have been only three parachuting deaths.

From there, we drove an hour from Missoula to visit Garnet, which was, in the 1890s, a town of 1000, but has been empty for more than 100 years. It is about 40 miles from Missoula, and about ten miles off a highway on a largely unpaved road.

The road to Garnet had no restaurants, and it was after 1 p.m. so we decided to head about 15 minutes in another direction and go to a Mexican restaurant with a 4.8 rating on  Google. Disappointment, although another beautiful lake side drive. It was just ordinary. But our friend Frida was hanging around.

We then went to  two museums, the Missoula Museum of Art downtown and the Montana Museum of Culture on the University of Montana campus.

Here is part of what we saw in the art museum which has exhibits focusing on indigenous art.

And on the University campus

Our last vacation dinner was at a wonderful informal Italian restaurant, Ciao Mambo. Everything was delicious, and the portions were unbelievably large. I ate half of mine. Here is what sadly will be thrown out.

Now….fill up and then turn in the car, get on a plane, and hopefully get home on time.

Oh. And the Nats scored 23 runs last night