Weird day trips from Bozeman

The strangest Bozeman finds are often a short drive out. These 20 day trips — Butte Crystals & Spiritual Wellness, Sacajawea Hotel, Virginia City Ghost Walk 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.

Explore Bozeman →

Butte Crystals & Spiritual Wellness A genuine metaphysical shop and practice in Butte, about 85 miles west of Bozeman, run by spiritual medium Do… Butte
Sacajawea Hotel Built in 1910 by railroad agent John Q. Adams as a stop for Milwaukee Road crews, this Historic Hotels of Ame… Three Forks
Virginia City Ghost Walk Virginia City is a preserved 1860s gold-rush town with a genuinely violent past of vigilante hangings and uns… Virginia City
Old Montana Prison Ghost Tours This decommissioned territorial prison in Deer Lodge ran from the 1870s into the 1970s and saw riots and deat… Deer Lodge
Headwaters Heritage Museum Set inside a 1910 former bank on the National Register, this volunteer-run museum is a glorious jumble of hea… Three Forks
Tippet Rise Art Center A 12,500-acre working sheep-and-cattle ranch in the Beartooth foothills where monumental sculptures are scatt… Fishtail
Big Sky Public Art Trail (Arts Council of Big Sky) The Arts Council of Big Sky has stewarded a growing collection of outdoor sculptures stitched along Town Cent… Big Sky
Art for the People at Moonlight Basin Big Sky's "Art for the People" initiative has scattered more than a dozen large-scale outdoor sculptures acro… Big Sky
Bleu Horses A herd of 39 life-and-a-half-size steel horses stands frozen mid-graze on a private hillside above Highway 28… Three Forks
Giant Chicken at Chico Hot Springs A nine-foot, vividly colored chicken statue stands incongruously along a hiking trail behind the historic Chi… Pray
Ringing Rocks A jumbled pile of ordinary-looking boulders at the edge of the Boulder Batholith that chime like bells when y… Whitehall
Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park One of the largest limestone caverns in the Northwest, toured only on a guided two-mile underground walk thro… Whitehall / Three Forks
The Jawbone About 80 miles north of Bozeman in tiny White Sulphur Springs, The Jawbone is an unexpectedly refined, 1920s-… White Sulphur Springs
Goose Bay Handblown Glass A handblown glass studio and shop on the main highway in tiny Townsend, where Jim and Terry offer one-on-one,… Townsend
Norris Hot Springs A geothermal soaking pool fed by chemically-free mineral water, with locally-milled fir planks laid right ove… Norris
Montana Learning Center Observatory (Mike & Lynn Rice Astronomical Park) Three observatories on the shore of Canyon Ferry Lake house Montana's largest publicly accessible telescope,… Helena (Canyon Ferry Lake)
Bannack State Park (ghost town) Montana's first territorial capital, born from an 1862 gold strike, now over 50 weathered log and frame build… Dillon (Bannack)
Nevada City Music Hall Inside a hall that began as a 1910 recreation building at Yellowstone's Canyon Lodge sits the largest public… Nevada City
Virginia City (Boot Hill & oddities) A gold-rush boomtown turned living ghost town, Virginia City was the capital of Montana Territory and the epi… Virginia City
Elkhorn State Park (ghost town) Montana's smallest state park is just two preserved buildings, Fraternity Hall and Gilliam Hall, standing amo… Boulder (Elkhorn)