No, we did not unexpectedly travel to Tijuana or Rio Dijanero. "The lady of the rockies" is a testament to Mary herself, purchased, constructed and paid homage to by generations of those Irish-Catholic miners.
We tried to stop in to see the "Butte pit" one of the Rocky mountain state's biggest ecological disasters. Once a gaping strip-mining hole, now a lake of sulfuric acid more than 1 mile wide and estimated to be nearly a mile deep. Caused by gross engineering oversight, underground river systems, and large deposits of sulfur that were hidden in the core of ancient mountains, until along came the greed of humanity and simple miners in need of work. But the pit was closed the day we tried to visit, and all we got a view of was the chain-link fence put up to protect living things from accidentally wandering into the sulfuric acid and burning themselves alive.
This is the nicely refurbished mining tunnel we couldn’t get through. This is the type of tunnel the men from my family’s past traveled through each day to work.