Road-trip 2026

Road-trip 2026 planning:

 Our summer trip really started in November 2025, when Kathy and I picked Butte, Montana as our destination of choice and it was going to be a circuitous route. All through the winter into the Spring of 2026 we spent a great deal of our downtime making a bucket list of things to see and do, plans, researching, and budgeting for our adventure and allowed 14-15 days to complete the loop.

 We selected Butte for three reasons: the first being our curiosity about Billy the Kid (originally from New York), his life and youth there. The second was to explore the mining history and legacy of the area. And thirdly, to visit the cultural side of Butte, being a mining town it pulled in Irish, Chinese, all kinds of people, and that mix is still alive there today.

As the plan came together, we figured we'd hit as many historic mining towns as we could along the way — it just made sense given the route. As well as the mining centres we would stop at other places of interest such as the Terry Fox Monument and Lookout at Thunder Bay, Ontario.

 The Venture to Butte Through Hades:

 The pavement at the Ojibway Mine was so hot it looked like it was sweating. I half joked to Kathy that she could probably chew it like it is black liquorice candy. That was early morning on Canada Day, July 2026, and as my partner Kathy and I loaded the trunk of the car near the salt mine’s perimeter, the dash display read 40°C (104°F), with the humidex factored in, but not included was the AQI reading that was nearing 400. That was before we’d even put the car in drive.

 We left Windsor enroute to our final destination and stopped at a McDonald's close by for a potty break and takeaway meals for first part of the journey. We then began our venture in earnest and took Highway 401 East. Our trip had barely got underway, when after about fifteen minutes in to it, the car's air conditioning died. We had to depend on the regular car ventilation plus roll down the windows and breathe in the humid, acrid air of southwestern Ontario.

 Nearly four hours later, we bypassed the shimmering heat and smog blanketing the Toronto skyline, before swinging north on Highway 400 through Barrie and on to Sudbury, Ontario.

At this juncture we turned west, later that same day near Sudbury on Highway 17, the sun had turned to an eerie, bruised crimson. Northern Ontario’s wildfires were spewing vast plumes of smoke and ash into the atmosphere. The AQI spiked to 500 and into the dangerous warning zone, the whole car reeked of it; that sharp jack pine smoke smell that you just can't get rid of; it was in our clothes, our hair, everything.

 Driving through the dense yellow smog, Sudbury’s massive mining landscape emerged like a major mining complex. We got off the road at the Big Nickel and looked in awe at the Creighton Mine with its iconic Superstack chimney towering about 380 metres (1250 feet) straight up in the air and a headframe, just looming over a mineshaft that goes thousands of meters straight down into the Canadian Shield, all to extract nickel and copper. " It's like driving on Mars," Kathy scowled, as she pulled her N95 mask higher over her nose while ash settled on the windshield.

 We pressed west along Lake Huron’s North Shore to Sault Ste. Marie, crossing the international bridge into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Travelling Interstate 75 south to St. Ignace, we caught a fleeting glimpse of the Mackinac Bridge totally enveloped by wildfire smoke as we banked west onto Highway 2 towards Iron Mountain. There, the mining heritage shifted to iron ore. At the historic Chapin Mine site, we stopped for a rest, at what was once the greatest iron ore mine in the upper peninsula. Then stood before its headframe that had conveyed the miners down the deep shaft and back up at the end of their workday. The mine employed about 900 people, of which about 500 worked as miners.

 At its peak, this place had the biggest steam-driven pump in the whole country — which, when you think about it, is kind of wild. A huge Cornish Pump Engine, a mechanical monster keeping the underground workings dewatered and basically was just trying to keep Lake Antoine from flooding the mine. Underground miners are naturally superstitious and two of the most dreaded fears they have are uncontrolled water and rats running up a ramp.

 Northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, honestly, that stretch just goes on forever. By this time, we were running on coffee, adrenaline, and grit at that point. The wildfires burning in Manitoba had continued to push the wildfire smoke across the Great Plains, blurring the horizon into a featureless grey. Heat advisories blitzed our cell phones every twenty minutes or so. We finally rolled into Butte completely wiped out but honestly were grateful that we made it.

 The legacy of Butte’s mining history was founded on gold, but copper became king and today's landscape is dominated by headframes that once lowered hundreds of miners into the belly of the earth. We picked a prime spot on the viewing deck of the Berkeley Pit headframe, and stared into the massive, flooded open pit copper mine. The sky was this thick hazy Montana grey, and you could just make out the Anselmo and Mountain Con headframes in the background, and we both just kind of went quiet at the same moment — didn't even need to say anything — how many guys went down that shaft and never really came back, one way or another.

 The first item on our bucket list was to look into the story of Henry McCarty, Billy the Kid, aka William H. Bonney. How Billy the Kid met his demise is historically known and recorded in newspapers, media and movies. However, nobody really ever talks about where he came from or what he was doing before all of that. His parents were Irish and Billy was a fluent Gaelic speaker and became orphaned at 15 years old. He may have been employed by the mine owners as an interpreter between them and the Irish miners. How and why did life turn so bad for him? As a translator, that's an occupation that's safe and sound, or so I thought. High grading gold ore was a common practise at the mines, we looked for evidence if he did high grade gold ore as a side hustle, but there was nothing conclusive.

 From Butte to Home Through Hades:

 Leaving Butte, we drove north to Canada, crossed the border, and headed towards Medicine Hat, Alberta. The prairie hills were bone dry — you could almost hear them crackle and the sun just hammered down on everything. Near Medicine Hat we spotted the giant teepee off the highway, then took the Trans-Canada Highway and drove across the prairies headed for Northwestern Ontario. The whole stretch of that drive the sun was just a dim magenta orb buried behind this weird, milky haze as wildfire smoke drifted down from the boreal forest.

 Once back in Northwestern Ontario, the familiar rugged bedrock landscape alongside the northern highways returned, and we headed on towards Thunder Bay. We took a scheduled rest at the scenic Terry Fox Monument and Lookout, where the imposing silhouette of the Sleeping Giant, a landmark natural rock formation that lay beyond in the distance across the waters of Lake Superior under a rare break in the haze. We stopped, taking in the view of the Sleeping Giant, and that part of Lake Superior, just stood there quietly for a while. Hard not to feel something at that spot.

 Then we continued south and followed the North Shore of Lake Superior, we crossed back into the United States near Duluth, Minnesota. Swept east through Superior, Wisconsin, and re-entered Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, tracing the quiet, forest-lined highways back toward St. Ignace. We crossed over the Mighty Mackinac Bridge and headed south into Mackinaw City, and took Interstate 75 South, cutting through the heartland of Michigan and onward to Port Huron. It was early evening with the sun low in the sky, the twin steel arches of the Blue Water Bridge came within our view in the distance. When cleared at the Canadian border crossing, we went south, followed the St. Clair River down through the countryside of Lambton and Essex counties.

 The sojourn through Hades came to an end:

 Later on that night, our tires finally slowed to a stop back near the perimeter entrance of the Ojibway Mine in Windsor. We were beat, clothes smelling of smoke, a fine layer of ash on everything, completely done in. We sat in our car, sipped a cold drink of water, and took it all in; we actually did it — the whole insane loop, start to finish. Sixty-five hundred kilometers of smoke, heat, and headframes — all of it behind us now, honestly, it’s hard to believe we did the whole loop. Right now we're just decompressing at home and getting back to normal.

 What an awesome experience! We completed the trip in seventeen days, a little longer than planned mainly due to prevailing conditions caused by wildfires and delays for road works we encountered. We were constantly posting along the way — selfies, smoke-filled skies, headframes — keeping everyone back home in the loop Getting the car’s air conditioning repaired, oil changed and serviced plus getting it detailed inside and outside all adds up in unforeseen costs that exceed our original budget estimates. Expensive lessons, but we'll know better next time.

 I leaned back in my recliner, put my feet up, reflected, sipped on a cold beer and Kathy asleep catching a much-needed rest, but when she awakens, I’m going to pitch the idea of our next adventure, perhaps a trip to the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Alaska.