Pullin' Chocks

Basking in Butte, Montana

After leaving our Wyoming meet-up with Cheryl, Paul, Lynn and Ed, we looked for a little cooler clime; and we found it in Butte, Montana. We found a little RV Park on the west side of town and they had good hook ups that ran our Air Conditioning very well. We actually wanted to go farther north near Glacier National Park, but the weather was even hotter up there with a few major forest fires burning; so we cooled our heels and discovered Butte, MT.

What seemed to be not much of a place on the surface, turned out to be another very special spot as we criss-cross our great country. Butte has it's deep roots in mining. The folks of Butte know how to work hard and work together. The mining operations both past and present were incredible. The town is sometimes called the mile high and mile deep town. It also claims the richest hill in the world. Although many element veins were mined in Butte over time, including gold and silver in the earler days, the copper mining was perhaps the most significant. The copper produced in Butte supplied over one third of all the copper needed in our country's electrical infrastructure. That is one heckofalot of copper! As a result, Butte was the third city in the U.S.A. to have street lights, behind only San Francisco and New York City! Butte is peppered with mining headframes, the crane/elevator structures that lower men and equipment down into the underground mines and haul the product to the surface from the earth's depths.

As a result of the substantial mining, jobs were abundant, and many immigrants of many nationalities came to Butte. Typically German immigrants opened beer breweries in the 1870s; Most ethnic groups in Butte, from Germans and Irish to Italians and various Eastern Europeans, including children, enjoyed the locally brewed lagers, bocks, and other types of beer. Today there are nearly 50 bars and taverns in Butte. We visited the Headframe Spirits distillery, which is a tasting room and not really a tavern or bar. Below are some of the pictures we captured while we stayed in Butte.

Gari in front of several headframes, east of town near the Berkeley Pit; which is the only active mining in Butte today.

Overlooking Butte; we found our first Geocache at this spot. People hide geocaches at interesting sites. It was that cache that brought us up to this overlook.

Around the university in town; we visited the Mining Museum and the Geology Museum on campus. Later we actually found a geocache hidden at the base of this sign!

Looking at the Mining Museum from behind the football field.

A view of the Orphan Girl Mine. Silver and zinc was mined here beginning in 1875 through 1952.

The Orphan Girl Mine headframe.

Mine cars at the museum.

Gari in front of an extraordinary geological sample, placed in front of a university building.

Steve at one of the engineering buildings.

Nice football field in a gorgeous mountain setting. The scoreboard is constructed to resemble the headframe mining structures around town. That is an example of how Butte continues to embrace their strong mining heritage.

The next few pictures are from the Geology Museum on campus. This museum had a wide variety of rock and minerals from around the world. Many were exquisite specimens. Quite a collection of fancy rocks!

Gari checking out more fancy rocks at a little side exhibit in one of the balconys.

A closer view of what Gari was inspecting.

Gari drawing our attention to the large safe which contained the Highland Gold Nugget. OooLaLa!

Gari points out this nugget weighs in at over 27 Troy Ounces!

Steve clowning around with the Siberian Bear Fossil. Steve flunks Geology :-(

Going up to the Geology Building. The campus is set in the hills of the surrounding mountains.

Next Stop the Headframe Spirits distillery in downtown Butte. This is John, the retired high school principle, providing the tour commentary at the distillery. John is decribing the unusual still, and the high tech control system.

Now John is describing each product produced at the distillery. They keep in the tradition of the mining community from the name of the place (Headframe) to the products; High Ore Vodka, and Orphan Girl (Bourbon Creme Liqueur - think Bailey's Irish Creme) these were our favorites :-)

Gari on the sample line.

Gari reviewing the sample wall. These samples were pulled from the aging barrels as part of the manufacturing process.

GEOCACHING: a game in which players are given the geographical coordinates of a cache of items which they search for with a GPS device. Since we recently acquired our hand held GPS receiver for our hiking activities, we have been thinking about trying Geocaching. It was in Butte that we had our first Geocaching experiences. One of the many benefits of Geocaching is that people often leave a cache at interesting locations. Our first find was made at a miner's memorial east of town at the Berkeley Pit. The monument memorializes the death of 168 men who were killed in a 1917 mining disaster.

The stand next to Gari had speakers that played audio accounting for the events of the disaster. The cache was hidden in a magnetic key box fastened to the back of the steel speaker enclosure.

A view of the Berkeley Pit from the Memorial.

Our second Geocache find on a nearby Butte overlook. This was rated a small cache in a green plastic coffee can hidden under a pile of rocks. The panoramic photo above is the view from this cache location.

Next stop Rocker Railway Station for a walk on the Greenway. A re-creation of the original rail station that served the Butte area for many years.

Gari looking over one of the older original railway terminal buildings.

Off we go on the Greenway, and stopping to find a geocache at the base of a sign along the way.

It is a microcache with a log sheet and a Denver Broncos braclet inside :-)

The next cache we found at the base of a bridge.

Steve retreiving the cache in a tupperware container, it was graded a small cache.

This cache had lots of "treasures" inside. The bigger treasure is the hunt, successfully finding and returning the cache unnoticed by "mugglers". Mugglers are nongeocachers that may take a cache away unknowingly.