Into the Mines at Butte

 

Mountain Consolidated Mining Tower:  "A mile high and a mile deep"

The ultimate destination of our journey was Butte, Montana.  It was the place where Dwight spent his first year out of college in 1957.  With a degree in geology in hand, he had gotten employment as a mine engineer trainee with Anaconda Mining.  At the time, Butte was a wide-open mining town.  Dwight was training to go to the Anaconda copper mines in Chile, but when the price of copper tanked, he was offered the choice between becoming a hard rock miner or being laid off.  He worked in the mines, underground, for about 4 months before joining the Army to do his required military service.  

The Berkley Pit in 1984

With a population around 33,500+, Butte is the 5th largest city in Montana.  It still depends on mining as its prime economic driver, along with the 2,500 students plus faculty at Montana Technical University, and also considerable employment driven by the Superfund site.  Dwight enjoyed trying to find his old haunts; I enjoyed exploring the mining history and the small-town quiet.  You can safely make a spontaneous U-turn in the middle of a main downtown street without worry.  Mining shaft towers dot the landscape (more than 200), although most are currently dormant.  The landscapes are stunning with the original upper town mining district now joined to a lower town in the valley, and the whole is surrounded by rolling, green hills.   A large part of the Butte hill is covered by the terraced Berkley Open Pit mine which was only added in the 1950's and is currently the largest Superfund Site in the US.  It is one mile long by ¹⁄₂ mile wide with an approximate depth of 1,780 feet, and is filled to a depth of about 900 feet with water that is heavily acidic, filled with toxic minerals. 

The morning after our arrival, we visited the World Museum of Mining, a slightly over-blown title for

Dwight at the World Museum of Mining

 a quiet re-creation of an old mining town.  We booked tickets for the underground tour, but since Dwight was in a transporter chair with small wheels, we decided it wouldn't make the trip on gravelly, damp paths.  Silverton's Old One Hundred mine with its cable cars taking visitors below ground gets the prize for mine tours. We then visited the Granite Mountain Memorial, a memorial to all the miners (over 2500) who had been lost in mining disasters in the Butte mines. 

We could see a storm approaching from the monument on the hill and decided to take the Tourist Bureau's trolley tour in the afternoon. 

Granite Hill Memorial 

Granite Hill Memorial
 (Did I mention there were no tourist hoards?)

The storm raged about us as we toured all the architectural wonders of the old town in the trolley;  plastic flaps protected us from the storm. The old town brought to mind the late 19th century buildings in Durango  -- Copper King Victorian Mansions; old, classy hotels; the red light district; a Masonic Lodge; labor union meeting halls; Chinatown, which still boasted restaurants started more than 100 years ago and still owned by the original family .  All in all, I enjoyed Butte much more than Yellowstone.  I guess I'm just a culture/history tourist rather than a landscape tourist.   We already live in the most beautiful wilderness area in the world, and we'll be happy to get back there!