I entered the Snake Pit and it was all my son Max’s fault.

There were, fortunately, no serpents in the building, despite the name.

Or reptiles of any sort, come to that.

The only inhabitant, so far as I could see, was a young man, who I took to be in his early 20s, sitting in a chair and changing his shoes.

He seemed surprised to see Max and I walking toward him.

Which was a reasonable reaction under the circumstances.

It was a Monday evening in late July and there would be no obvious reason for anyone, much less a couple of strangers, to be striding into the gymnasium at Anaconda High School in southwestern Montana.

But Max had seen the wooden wedge that propped open the gym door as we walked past on the sidewalk.

My wife Lisa and I, and our daughter, Olivia, were partway down the block when Max ran up behind us, telling us about the open door.

I was intrigued.

It was the second day of our road trip vacation through Montana. We had parked in downtown Anaconda, and right off we saw a poster, in the window of a closed business, featuring the Anaconda High School logo.

It’s a snake, fangs extended, entwined around a capital letter A.

Anaconda’s mascot is the copperhead.

This choice is biologically inapt — copperheads, a type of venomous pit viper, don’t live in Montana.

(The state’s only poisonous reptile, according to my brief online research, is the prairie rattlesnake.)

But scientific niggling aside, the copperhead is a perfectly appropriate choice to represent the high school in this city of about 9,500 residents not far west of Butte.

Anaconda was, quite literally, built on copper.

Massive amounts of the metal were mined nearby. And although the excavations ended more than 40 years ago, the remnants are conspicuous.

Unavoidable, actually.

The smoke stack that belched byproducts of the Anaconda Copper Company’s smelter still stands — although soars seems to me the more appropriate verb — above a mountain of black slag just southwest of the city.

The stack, at 585 feet tall, is “one of the tallest free-standing brick structures in the world,” according to Montana State Parks, which manages a park with a fine view of the tower.

(I find it refreshing that the agency, unusual among government outfits with their customary banal jargon, notes on its website, with palpable pride, that the stack is 30 feet taller than the Washington Monument. To quote the park’s website: “The stack dominates the landscape like the company once dominated the area’s economic life.”)

Although I missed the propped open door that caught Max’s attention, we all saw the sign painted on the gym’s exterior wall.

“The Snake Pit.”

A natural enough name, of course, for a school with a serpent for a mascot.

When Max told us about the door my curiosity about small town high school mascots was piqued.

Considering that I might not ever visit Anaconda again, I felt compelled to go inside. I figured the gym floor ought to be emblazened with a stylized Copperhead logo.

Indeed it was.

But that wasn’t the whole of it.

As soon as we stepped into the gym — we were on a sort of mezzanine, with the main stack of bleachers above us — I noticed the pleasant scent of fresh varnish.

After telling the young man why I was there — he smiled as if he understood my compulsion — I asked about the odor.

He said the gym floor had just been refinished. This was the first day players were allowed inside, and from his sweaty hair I judged that he had been shooting and dribbling.

We had a brief conversation of the sort that for me makes road trips through rural areas so endlessly entertaining.

He was a former Copperhead.

He told Max and I that the gym had been renovated just a few years before, with new plastic bleachers replacing the original wooden seats.

The walls were festooned with banners documenting the Copperheads’ accomplishments dating back more than a century — district titles and state championships.

I imagined, as I always do in such places, the hundreds of games that have been played. I envisioned the fans, the Anaconda faithful, donning their heavy coats as they walked toward the exits, ready to brave the frigid Montana night. I tried to conjure the conversations — excited recollections of the plays that led to a thrilling win over Butte or Helena or Missoula, or the more subdued lament of a shot that rimmed out, or a referee’s inexplicable foul call that contributed to a loss.

There was of course nothing like that for Max and I to talk about after we had thanked the man. It was just an almost empty gym, the doldrums of summer, the intermission.

But I felt fortunate to have been there, to have had a sense, however ephemeral, of this building and the vital role it plays, as all small-town gymnasiums do.

I had a few other memorable moments during our trip.

I will long remember the candy store in Philipsburg, a finely preserved mining town that seemed to me what Sumpter might be if not for the devastating fire in 1917.

And a brief conversation with the clerk in the mercantile in Wisdom, population about 100, who patiently answered my questions about how cold it had gotten there last winter.

(It was a mild season, by the standards of the Big Hole Valley. About 36 below zero, she said. Or maybe 37 below, another customer, obviously a local, suggested as he perused a nearby shelf.)

And a baseball diamond in Valier, home to about 540 people. The field was knee-high in weeds, the metal backstop missing much of the chain link fencing that used to keep foul balls from beaning spectators. There was something inexpressibly sad about the field, a place where kids once frolicked but which seemed to have been forgotten, there on the prairies that extend from the Rocky Mountain front for hundreds of miles.

We did more typically tourist things on our trip.

We went to the state capitol in Helena.

We saw the falls in Great Falls.

We hiked in Glacier National Park and dipped our toes in Lake McDonald.

But I have a special affinity for the impromptu experiences that tend to happen when you eschew interstates for backroads, and park in towns that don’t have glossy promotional pamphlets.

Or pay attention when you 13-year-old son sees a gym door propped open.