Helena
"They found gold in this creek in 1864 and the town that grew up around it still can't decide if it's a mining camp or a capital city."
Helena is one of those American cities that requires a certain kind of attention to appreciate — not instantly beautiful, not obviously dramatic, but layered in ways that reward walking. I arrived on a gray afternoon in late October and followed Last Chance Gulch, the former placer mining creek that is now the city’s pedestrian mall, from the old downtown south toward the Civic Center. The Victorian buildings along it have a weight and self-seriousness that comes from gold — actual, extracted, banked gold — and the names of the early businesses carved above doorways (assay offices, hardware merchants, fraternal lodges) tell you something about what kind of city this was trying to be in 1880.
The gold rush here started in 1864 and ran hard enough to make Helena temporarily one of the wealthiest cities per capita in the United States. By 1888 there were reportedly more millionaires per square mile in Helena than anywhere else on the continent. What that money built is still standing: the Cathedral of Saint Helena, a gothic twin-spired stone structure that looks borrowed from an Austrian valley and transported to the Montana mountains; the Original Governor’s Mansion, a Victorian Queen Anne pile in turreted brick; the Montana State Capitol building with its copper-domed rotunda and its enormous Charles Russell mural of Lewis and Clark meeting the Flathead Indians.
The Montana Historical Society Museum, next to the Capitol, is worth more time than most visitors give it. The C.M. Russell Gallery within it houses the largest public collection of Charlie Russell’s work — the cowboy-turned-artist whose paintings and bronzes documented the transformation of Montana from open-range cattle country to fenced and subdivided agricultural land. Russell worked at the end of something, and he knew it, and that knowledge gives his art a quality of elegy that goes beyond technical accomplishment.
The Mount Helena City Park rises directly behind the downtown, a network of trails that gains almost 400 meters in two kilometers and delivers a view of the city, the Missouri River drainage, and on clear days the Gates of the Mountains to the north — the dramatic limestone canyon that Lewis and Clark entered in 1805 and named, with unusual lyricism, for the way the canyon walls seemed to open before them like gates. I ran the summit trail on my second morning and was back at street level before the coffee shops opened.
The city has a restaurant scene that outperforms its size, partly because the state government brings in a class of educated professionals who want decent wine and more than steak. The breweries along the valley floor have improved steadily, and there’s a natural wine shop on the pedestrian mall that stocks bottles from biodynamic producers in France and Italy alongside Montana winemakers working the Bitterroot and Mission Valleys.
A few kilometers north of Helena, Canyon Ferry Lake — a reservoir on the Missouri River built in the 1950s — provides boating, fishing, and swimming that the city treats as its backyard. In summer the Missouri River below Canyon Ferry Dam offers float trips through agricultural bottomland that still looks much as it did when Lewis and Clark paddled it in 1805.
When to go: May through October for comfortable walking weather. October is particularly good — the crowds thin, the cottonwoods along the Missouri turn gold, and the city feels most like a working state capital rather than a tourist destination. The Montana legislature meets every odd year, January through May, which changes the character of the town considerably.