Pocatello’s Mountain View Cemetery is across the street from where we have our motor home parked. The past several days, Nina and I have started our day off with a walk in the cemetery. I’ve taken a few pictures….

Today’s walk in the cemetery included a bluebird sky and just about perfect weather. The weather will be changing this evening with a cold front coming through; tomorrow will be 20° cooler than today. It’s a mile from our camper (bottom right of the image) to the far end of the cemetery (top left of the image). We usually walk for about an hour, meaning that we get around 2.5 miles in the walk.

The roads and pathways in the cemetery are well maintained and nice to walk on. The whole place is well covered with trees and the walk is nice and shady. In a week or so the leaves will start coming down with real intent and the walking may be less pleasant than it was today and earlier this week!

Fortunately there are a number of benches available throughout the cemetery. Most are placed on or around graves and put by the family. There are a couple of big benches under fir trees put there by the cemetery officials. In any regard, they are welcomed sights! This bench, however, has particular interest in that it is not only a bench, but also the headstone. The bench itself is very comfortable and Nina likes it because her feet are flat on the ground when she’s sitting on the bench. I rather like the photograph built into the back of the bench as well. I wonder what a bench/headstone like this would cost? We’ve got grave sites in Utah beside Trevor’s grave….

There are a number of family plots in the cemetery. In the oldest part of the cemetery many of the family plots are outlined with fences or cement blocks. This particular family plot is likely to be very Catholic! It’s well maintained, so there are living family members taking care of the graves and keeping thing in place, clean, and tidy.

This set of graves are distinctive! The writing on the headstones is in a very Greek font, but in English rather in Greek. The headstone on the right says that the family immigrated to the United States in 1925. There is a fairly large Greek community in Pocatello along with one of the oldest standing orthodox churches in the United States. The building is getting a much-needed facelift which is almost completed.

In the cemetery is a large section of Japanese graves. This site is not in that section (perhaps a picture in the future), but rather in a newer section. A large number of Japanese came to Pocatello in the late 1880’s to work on the railroad. There is a Japanese garden out at the airport maintained by the Japanese community here in Pocatello. And, many of these families were dramatically impacted by the (highly unjust) Japanese internment actions by the US Government during World War II.

In the center of the cemetery is the James H. Brady Memorial Chapel. The chapel is only open on Memorial Day. The rest of the year it is closed and not open to anyone. I’ve no idea why…. It seems like a delightful place to hold funerals or other events. We’ve visited on Memorial Day and found it to be a very inviting place.

I took this picture of the front door of the chapel on our walk earlier this week. The chapel is a “portal” the world-wide game called “Ingress“, to which I am a very recent recruit. Jared and Tania are fully engaged in this game and we had fun playing it while they were here visiting us in Pocatello. So, as I hacked the portal, I took a picture!


Still no mission call. We’re waiting patiently!!