destination BABB

Celebration is for locals by locals, but everyone is invited

By noon July 27, Thronson's General Store in Babb is sold out of Camel Lights. And Camel Filters. Marlboro Lights are available only in soft packs.

Hanging in the store's window, a small sign - handwritten in thick, aggressive black marker - warns festival-goers that the bathroom is not for public use.

For one weekend a year, hundreds of beatniks and ravers, hipsters and intrepid travelers descend on Babb. They come to attend BabbFest, an annual, two-day music festival that can, at times, be unsparingly compared to a mini-acid test of electric Kool-Aid abandon.

"It'll be the talk of the town for a few weeks," said Volley Reed, whose dark skin dissolved into well-worn creases as he squinted against the midday sun. Reed, with a cowboy hat pushed back on his head, was outside Thronson's on the morning of July 27, the day after the festival ended.

Connected to the town's only motel, the general store is replete with uneven wood floors and white-painted behind-the-counter cubbyholes cradling the full gamut of goods and touristy trinkets. It has been owned by the same family for generations.

The store's porch is a meeting place for nearby residents; Reed was there preparing for a four-wheeling excursion into the mountains with friends.

"The festival kind of puts Babb on the map," said Reed, observing that that the town, as a whole, welcomes the event. "It's good for the community, brings in a couple of extra dollars."

Already famed for its hunting and renowned rainbow trout fishing in nearby Duck Lake, Babb sits practically astride the Many Glacier entrance to Glacier National Park.

Typically a rest stop for tourists passing through to Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada or the mouth of Going-to-the-Sun Road at St. Mary - the speed limit through the dusty, two-church, one-gas station town doesn't drop below 40 mph - Babb becomes a destination town for the annual music festival.

"There's more people in Babb for BabbFest than on any day of the year," said Bailey Rountree during a break from his duties as a waiter at the Babb Press.

Along with the rustic Cattle Baron bar and steakhouse (which residents say once was rated the second-rowdiest bar in America when the place was the Babb Bar), the Babb Press is one of the town's two eateries.

Recently renovated in red tile and school-building ceiling tile, the diner boasts a lunch counter and lacquered pressboard tables - proving that austere retro doesn't have to be a conscious design choice.

"Babb is the only place in the world you can live on nothing," said Christopher Hamlet, who owns the diner and goes by the nickname "Giblet."

"That's how everybody here learned to take care of everybody else. Summer here is crazy enough, the festival adds a little variety to it."

With the festival in full swing, scoring a table at the famed Two Sisters Cafe can take hours. Once featured in Outdoor Magazine and The New York Times, the gaudy, pastel-painted restaurant sits a couple of miles south of the town limits, near where the second day of the festival kicked off at the Chewing Blackbones Campground on Montana 89.

BabbFest is a unique creation - organized by locals for locals, but everyone else is invited. But even many of the "locals" are itinerant.

Bailey has been spending summers in Babb for eight years - some spent working at Charlie's Place and some spent working at the Babb Press. During the winter, Reed builds ice roads in Alaska.

"This really isn't our home, either. We're visitors too," said Rountree, who wears emo glasses, a scruffy beard, and his hair long. "It's really kind of a motley crew when you think about it."

A substantial portion of people attending the festival work on a seasonal basis at Glacier National Park's chalets and restaurants.

Many of them begin filtering into town on the 25th - the evening before the all-day music and beer backwater fete at Chewing Blackbones.

A ragged tent city begins to sprout on the ridge overlooking Charlie's Place, sharing the skyline with a decrepit-looking Catholic church. A funk band from California will play to a packed house before the festival moves a couple miles down the road.

With its thick red carpet, black bar and smoke-wreathed stage, Charlie's Place is where BabbFest all began.

"We started getting bigger and bigger acts, and the kids in the park loved it," said Ryan Braswell, the festival's organizer.

Braswell, a former Charlie's Place bartender, moved the festival outdoors in 2004.

"It was simple. After doing it for five years, I realize how simple it used to be," said Braswell, himself evidence of the festival's local roots.

Despite its small-town origins, BabbFest attracts a variety of people - the legacy of Charlie's Place owner Robert Henry "Lil' Bob" Burns, Braswell said.

Lil' Bob, a 6-foot 4-inch, 350 pound member of the Blackfeet tribe, died in February from complications related to alcoholism. His best friend, Tom Gervais, says Lil' Bob died from a broken heart.

Charlie's Place is now owned by Lil' Bob's wife, Lona Burns. The couple bought the bar from Lil' Bob's parents three years ago, she said. Lil' Bob had run the bar for years before buying it.

"BabbFest brings so many different people from so many different places that it brings life to the valley," Burns said. "The thing that makes BabbFest so special this year is that it's a tribute to Lil' Bob."

Soon, the metal-roofed and weather-faded businesses of Babb will all but shut down. Summer is unquestionably the town's lifeblood. In the colder months, sometimes only the most basic institutions required to classify Babb as a town stay open.

"The Post Office stays open, the school stays open. That's about it," Rountree said.

But the tight-kit, small-town community will continue to function, despite the weather.

"In about another month the whole valley will close down because the season will be over," Reed said. "Then we do kind of whatever it takes to survive, that's what it boils down to."

Reporter Nicholas Ledden can be reached at 758-4441 or by e-mail at nledden@dailyinterlake.com