October 14, 2023
As usual, no runners showed up for the Saturday morning group run other than Shelley and me so we drove to Lake Elmo State Park to take our first shot at running the streets of Billings Heights. The Heights is part of the city but separated from it by the rimrocks. There’s been some talk about this area wanting to separate from Billings and becoming a city of their own. They feel, somewhat rightly, that the main part of the city gets all the attention and that they get the leftovers. A local writer once commented that the Heights couldn’t become its own city because it lacked some of the features required to do so: a bowling alley, a brewery, a swimming pool, a theater, etc.
The Heights is defined by 2 features of its own: Main Street and Skyview High School. Most of the commercial/retail business is collected on either side of Main Street and indistinguishable from hundreds of other main streets across the nation: same banks, same chain stores, same restaurants, same fast food places, and so on with the addition of the ubiquitous casinos and their cousins, the pawnshops. Skyview High School in the height of the Heights, away from the commercials zone. The rest of the area is a mish-mash of housing types and some faux-rural residences.
I made a map with our usual 6.2 miles distance but, for some reason, the distance run, as measured by the GPS on my watch, came up short. Whatever. It was a good run with some nice scenery and very cool temperatures.
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