Weird day trips from Missoula

The strangest Missoula finds are often a short drive out. These 17 day trips — Ohrmann Museum & Gallery, Anaconda Smelter Stack (The Big Stack), Nimrod Warm Springs and more — are each hand-vetted and sourced: ghost towns, hot-spring soaks, roadside oddities, and odd small-town museums worth the gas. A weird day trip is its own kind of date.

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Ohrmann Museum & Gallery Rancher Bill Ohrmann taught himself to weld and paint late in life (his first big sculpture at age 79) and sp… Drummond
Anaconda Smelter Stack (The Big Stack) Rising 585 feet over the hills east of Anaconda, this 1919 copper-smelter chimney is the tallest free-standin… Anaconda
Nimrod Warm Springs This is a completely undeveloped warm spring on private land where the family owners quietly allow respectful… Nimrod / Bearmouth (east of Missoula)
Double Arrow Lookout (overnight fire tower rental) Sleep inside a working-era fire lookout: this 1933 tower stands on a 20-foot base with a wraparound catwalk a… Seeley Lake (day trip from Missoula)
Lolo Hot Springs Set high in the Lolo National Forest just shy of the Idaho line, this rustic spring sits well away from town… Lolo, MT
Symes Hot Springs Hotel & Mineral Baths Built in 1929-30 by businessman Fred Symes, this Mission-style hotel on the National Register has flamingo-pi… Hot Springs, MT
World Famous 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar This sprawling roadside stop just off I-90 near the Idaho line is studded with over 80,000 dollar coins embed… Haugan, MT
Ringing Rocks Up a rough gravel road east of Butte sits a pile of weathered boulders that chime like bells when struck with… near Pipestone / Whitehall, MT
Old Montana Prison Ghost Tours The Old Montana Prison opened in 1871 and held inmates until 1979, and its stone cell house, gallows yard and… Deer Lodge
Garnet Ghost Town Montana's best-preserved ghost town sits high in the Garnet Range, with around 30 weathered buildings standin… Garnet Range (east of Missoula)
Miracle of America Museum A sprawling five-acre village of 40-plus buildings crammed with one collector's lifetime of stuff: vintage mo… Polson
Ninepipes Museum of Early Montana A small, idiosyncratic collection on the Flathead Indian Reservation, filled with life-size dioramas of an ea… Charlo
Daly Mansion The 24,000-square-foot summer home of copper baron Marcus Daly, frozen as a quirky historic-house museum in t… Hamilton
Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild A 26-acre forest sculpture park in tiny Lincoln, where large-scale installations by international artists are… Lincoln, MT (Blackfoot Valley)
Lolo Pass dark-sky meadow Locals point to Lolo Pass as the easiest genuinely dark sky you can simply drive to from Missoula. Across the… Lolo / Lolo Pass (Idaho-Montana line)
Quinn's Hot Springs Resort A riverside resort along the Clark Fork with a series of mineral pools at graduated temperatures (roughly 100… Paradise, MT (Clark Fork River valley)
Granite Ghost Town State Park Established after silver was discovered here in 1872, Granite quickly grew into a bustling boomtown known as… Philipsburg