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Butte, America

Butte, Montana is an old mining boomtown turned regular mining city and now involved in some pretty high-tech environmental clean up and continued mining industry. I fell in-love with it immediately. Butte is packed with history, it’s beginnings were in silver and gold mining, but as soon as copper was discovered Butte exploded into the largest mining city in the American West and one of the largest cities in America for several decades. Butte had a strong influx of Irish and Chinese settlers, their influence is still strong in today’s Butte. These hardworking immigrants who raised the city were so proud of their mining town and newly minted American heritage, they rarely referred to Butte as “Butte, Montana”, but always “Butte, America,” a nickname that has stuck amongst locals and anyone else proud of this still thriving mining town.

I feel like I should provide ample warning in advance; over the next couple of posts about my Montana trip there will be a ridiculous number of photos of gorgeous, snow-capped mountains. I think it’s like when someone goes to Hawaii and they take ten thousand pictures of sunsets? Yeah, this is kind of like that, but instead of sunsets it’s soaring peaks of gorgeousness. You’ve been warned.

J-Mo finished school in Butte, and he took me to his old campus to show me around. It sits up on the hill in Butte and has the most gorgeous views of the city. I know, I know, most people don’t consider an old mining town with massive environmental clean-up problems gorgeous, but I am harboring a big crush.

Overlooking Butte is Our Lady of the Rockies, a 90 foot tall statue that was placed atop the Continental Divide in 1985. She sits 8,500 feet above sea level and was hoisted up there in pieces by a helicopter. Kind of awesome.

I can’t remember exactly what this thingie is, but it has a lot to do with mining and they are all over the city. (J-Mo is shaking his head at his screen right now, because he explained this thingie to me five different times. I think it’s called…a headframe?  Maybe? Do I know what it does? …Not really. Something with mining? I can’t remember, my explanation(s) were weeks ago! Give me a break. ) They do look really cool stretching up towards the bright blue sky though, right?

In the hills above Butte is a memorial to the largest mining disaster in Butte’s history. In 1917 the Granite Mountain mine was one of the best ventilated mines in Butte, and when an accidental spark ignited 2400 feet down in the shafts, the fire that ensued spread like, well, wildfire. At the time there were 15,000 men working in the mine around the clock; after the fire it took almost two weeks to get all the bodies out of the shafts, 168 men were dead.You can read more about it here.

The memorial is named after this particular disaster, but is to honor all the men who died in Butte’s mines. It was sobering to read all the statistics and quotes and stories etched into the granite memorial, to see all the flags of the miner’s nationalities represented.

I couldn’t help but remember more recent disasters, the Chilean mine collapse and eventual rescue more than three months later last fall; and the collapse of the Crandall Canyon mine in 2007 in southern Utah. So many men and so little to do to help them once they are trapped so far below the surface.

Overlooking Butte and the copper mine.

See? More gorgeous mountains. And cool-looking mining stuff.

By World War I this open-pit copper mine was dubbed The Richest Hill on Earth. The depth and scope of this mining enterprise is astounding. (The world’s largest open-pit copper mine is practically in my back yard, but I haven’t been since I was a kid. After seeing the mines in Butte I started getting a pretty good hankering to get myself up to Kennecott. Back to Butte…)

Yep, big-time mining town. Kind of awesome. J-Mo and I didn’t go through the museum, but we did go visit the Berkeley Mine Pit, which is one of the old open-pit mines.

The Berkeley Pit was a very profitable mine for over 30 years, and when it stopped being profitable it was slowly filled with water, you can see some of the progress here.

At this point the water in the pit is so highly acidic it’s practically toxic, the mine administrators are working on cleaning it up in  massive environmental overhaul. But, you guys, this is a GIANT pit. It’s gonna take a while.

I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by this, but I was.  I am amazed at the work and industry that went into carving out such an enormous pit, I am enthralled by the history, and I am proud of the current citizens and miners who are going to such efforts to clean up decades worth of their predecessors work. I am really interested to see what happens over the next couple of decades, in Butte and elsewhere in the Rocky Mountain West where mining has played such an enormous part of our history. I also want to check out this documentary, Butte, America.

After my mini tour around Butte, I received a brief history lesson on local-boy-made-good, Evil Knievel, and then J-Mo took me to get the obligatory pork-chop sandwich, one of Butte’s specialties.  Pretty soon we were off towards the rest of my Green Jeep Tour* through southwestern Montana.

See more photos here.

*Sorry, you can’t hire Green Jeep Tours to chauffeur you around the back roads of Montana, giving you bits of history and politely stopping every few minutes when you squeal “Ooooh! Look at that!!! CanYouPleaseStopIWantToTakeAPicture!!!” It’s a J-Mo special.

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