Helena

The first thing you notice about Helena is that its downtown doesn’t run in a grid. Last Chance Gulch, the pedestrian street at the heart of the city, curves and doubles back on itself for no logical urban-planning reason — until you learn it follows the exact bends of the actual gulch where four prospectors struck gold in 1864 on their last attempt before giving up on Montana entirely. Lia and I walked its length twice just to feel the curve of it, past Victorian storefronts built directly over the mining channel, in a state capital that still feels more like a boomtown than a seat of government.

Last Chance Gulch and Reeder’s Alley

We spent our first afternoon wandering Last Chance Gulch’s brick and cast-iron storefronts, ducking into galleries and a coffee shop that used to be a bank vault, before finding our way to Reeder’s Alley — a cluster of stone miners’ quarters from the 1870s, some of the oldest buildings in the state, now restored into shops and studios. The scale of it surprised us: Helena’s gold rush minted more millionaires per capita than almost anywhere in the country, and you can feel that old wealth in the ornate cornices two and three stories above street level, even as the alley below stays narrow and workaday.

Mount Helena at sunrise

Helena’s real advantage over other state capitals is that wilderness starts at the edge of downtown. We were on the Mount Helena City Park trail before six the next morning, switchbacking up through Douglas fir and open grassland until the whole Helena Valley opened below us — the gold dome of the state capitol, the cathedral spires, the gulch itself tracing its crooked line through the middle of it all, with the Elkhorn Mountains holding the horizon. We had the summit to ourselves except for a pair of mule deer that watched us catch our breath and didn’t bother moving.

The Cathedral and Spring Meadow Lake

Back in town, the twin spires of the Cathedral of St. Helena — modeled on Cologne’s cathedral, financed by another wave of mining money — dominate the skyline from almost anywhere in the valley, its interior a surprise of Bavarian stained glass this far into cattle country. In the evening we cooled off at Spring Meadow Lake, a spring-fed former gravel pit just west of downtown that Helena residents treat like a beach, and floated on our backs while ospreys worked the far shore.

Getting There

Helena Regional Airport sits just minutes from downtown, with direct flights from Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Minneapolis. By car, Helena is about ninety minutes north of Bozeman and just under two hours west of Great Falls via I-15, a drive that runs along the Missouri River for much of its length. Downtown and Mount Helena’s trailheads are both walkable from most central hotels, making a car useful mainly for day trips to the Gates of the Mountains or nearby ghost towns.