One of them was burgers (steamed and ready to eat in 60 seconds - we passed and opted for microwaved chicken sandwiches instead).
The other was water.
Now, on the following Wednesday morning, photographer Michael Gallacher and I are outside the Pioneer Café, where the overhead sign advertises “Steaks, homemade pastries, home-style cookin' ” and “pure water.”
You don't have to be in Roundup long to figure out what's on people's minds - it's the water that comes out of their faucets.
How bad is it?
“That breakfast you just ate?” a customer inside the Pioneer tells us a while later. “Don't care how good it was. Take a drink of Roundup water and you'll throw it all up.”
It's not that bad, according to Lon Sibley, director of public works for the city of Roundup.
“Personally, I drink it all the time,” says Sibley, who has worked for the city for 17 years but has only been director of public works for four days. “Of course, I've lived here all my life and it's all I ever drank.”
Roundup's water comes out of an old coal mine near the Musselshell River, and by all accounts, contains a lot of iron and manganese and tastes like rust.
“I wouldn't know what it tastes like,” says L.J. Holmes, one of the owners of the Pioneer Café, where they put tap water through a 13-filter system before serving it to customers. “I've never drank it. They told me not to, so I don't.”
Roundup isn't the only town with water woes in eastern Montana. There are troubles on the Hi-Line, and across a six-county region here, where water is either of poor quality or there isn't enough of it in several communities.
Sometimes, it's a combination of both.
The solution?
It may be 100 miles away.
Sibley takes us over to the south side of town, to a footbridge near the Musselshell County Fairgrounds, and we hike across the river and over to the base of the Bull Mountains to see the old coal mine where Roundup gets its water.
Then we hike up the mountain - it's more of a hill - to sandstone cliffs high above the river. The river itself isn't a good source of water because of all the fertilizers and pesticides it collects from agricultural operations along its banks. The cost of treatment plants would be astronomical, Sibley explains.
Besides, the Musselshell can run dry in the heat of summer, and the city has no water rights to the river anyway.
But up on the cliff on this gray day, where Russell Chatham-like scenery spreads out beyond Roundup, Sibley points to the northwest, where the answer to his town's water problems may lie.
Monty Sealey, executive director of the Central Montana Resource Conservation and Development Area, had explained the project before we left Roundup City Hall to hike up into the hills.
The idea began, Sealey said, in the 1990s, when the city manager in Lewistown offered to sell water to Roundup.
“Big Springs in Lewistown is one of the purest sources of water in the Northwest,” Sealey said. It bubbles to the surface from the Madison aquifer in the foothills of the Big Snowy Mountains and there is plenty of it.
But the cost of building a pipeline over the Snowy Mountains that rise between Lewistown and Roundup would have been prohibitive.
Still, the idea that there was good water to be had kept local officials investigating. Roundup joined forces with other communities in similar straits, and Hobson, Broadview, Judith Gap, Harlowton, Ryegate, Lavina, Melstone and Roundup formed the Central Montana Regional Water Authority.
And then?
“We went prospecting for water,” Sealey said.
They found it across the highway from the unincorporated town of Utica, about 35 miles west of Lewistown, where a test well was drilled 3,700 feet into the earth.
This water, too, comes out of the Madison aquifer, but unlike Big Springs, which is recharged from the Snowy Mountains, this part of the aquifer relies on the Little Belts.
“It's pure enough it doesn't need to be treated,” Sealey said. “We've proven it's there, in quality and quantity.”
They estimate the cost of the project at about $50 million - a fraction, they say, of what it would cost to build treatment plants in all the towns, and less than it would have cost to build a pipeline between Big Springs and Roundup, which would have solved Roundup's problem but nobody else's.
“It's a relatively small water project when you look at what they're spending in other places,” Sealey said, pointing to $300 million projects on the Hi-Line.
Back in town, you'll find people who blame the city's pipeline system, not the source, for the bad taste of Roundup's water, but Sibley explains that the pipes have corroded because of the source water. Until a better source is found, replacing the pipes won't help.
Meantime, local folks can get a taste of their potential new source for drinking water at City Hall, where the sign over the water cooler informs folks that this is “Utica Water.”
Sibley actually hasn't been drinking the Roundup water all his life. He spent his first seven years in Illinois before his father, who came out to Montana to hunt each fall, found work in the oil fields and the family moved to Roundup.
“We got here on New Year's Day, and it was 20 below zero,” Sibley says. “My mom was not impressed.”
And, of course, the water turned out to be as bad as the weather.
These days, bars and restaurants that have systems to remove the minerals from Roundup's water brag about it. And those that don't?
“Well, I know a guy who says the toughest drink in the Arcade Bar is a ditch,” Sealey says.
But they're working on it.
“Right now, we're just jumping through all the hoops to ask Congress to put an appropriation together,” he adds.
If everything plays out perfectly, water that tastes like water could be in Roundup, and several other central Montana towns, by 2011.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at (406) 319-2117 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.
Photographer Michael Gallacher can be reached at mgallacher@missoulian.com or at 523-5270.
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