I Like Big Buttes and I Cannot Lie

Today was a fun day of touring. After packing up from Deer Lodge, we went to see Anaconda and Butte. Butte is, well, a butte (a hill, for those not in the know) that was filled with gold, silver, and mostly copper that has been mined for the last hundred years. This one hill has produced over $48 billion of ore over that time. Headframes (wood frames that served as elevators over the main shafts) still stand over the city skyline, giving feelings of the old west, lords of industry, saloons, and mines. The whole city is perched on a slope, which makes walking and driving an adventure—everything is either uphill or downhill from where you are… not a fun place to learn to drive stick shift!

Anaconda is just down the road (and the hill) from Butte. This is also a mining town, but it was built around smelting the ore mined from Butte. It was named after the mining company. Its most notable landmark is its enormous smoke stack, so high that you can probably find information about it on the internet. The top rim of it is so thick that you can drive a horse carriage around it. The hard part is getting the horses up there… it’s much easier to get them down when you’re done. Also notable in this town are its library (a lone spot of culture funded by the Hearsts) and its art deco movie theater.

Both towns have a negative legacy from the mining industry. They could euphemistically be described in the “bust” stage of the boom and bust cycle, with the extra bonus of THREE Superfund sites. (For our Canadian readers, Superfund sites are designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as abandoned industrial areas that pose a significant health and environmental hazard that have to be cleaned up by the taxes collected from other industrial giants.) Butte has the Berkeley pit, an abandoned pit mine with water so acidic and laden with heavy metals that it killed a flock of endangered trumpeter swans that landed in it a few years ago; Anaconda has the smokestack and the slag piles left over from smelting. The slag piles have been seeded with grass and turned into a destination golf course. Just don’t dig into the turf…
(Berkeley Pit from the side... you can't see the blue, toxic water that goes a thousand feet deep)

After seeing these two outposts of the wild west, we went back to Bozeman and ate at a restaurant that had VEGETARIAN food (Alan got meat). We camped in the Sunrise campground, 25 feet from the freeway and 100 yards from the train tracks. It’s cheap, clean, and the people are friendly, so we’re happy here for now!

(We think this was a forest fire that we saw on our way home)