#berkeley pit

Berkeley Pit, Butte, Montana, 1969.

DAY 1 - OREGON TO SPOKANE: We started out the trip a little insane. It was a good omen of what the whole thing was going to be like lol We worked our normal Saturday, getting up at 4:30am and working until about 3pm. Unpacked the product from my van, unpacked the mini-van completely, and then repacked up for the trip and took off! We slept that night in Spokane. Around 6-7 hrs total with stops. DAY 2 - DRIVING ACROSS IDAHO AND MONTANA: We crossed the little upper part of Idaho, into Montana, and drove to Butte, Montana where we stopped at the Berkeley Pit. This was an open pit mine where they mined copper. It's now full of water and minerals and super acidic - about as acidic as lemon juice! It makes for all kinds of pretty colors, but those were kind of muted when we were there due to rain and a big storm brewing. [Note: I’m not endorsing pit mining in anyway. I’m pretty pissed about it in general, but I was pretty interested to see the resultant lake that is currently there.]

[image description: a man in a jacket is walking into a tunnel that has open wood gates and wood facing with a sign above it reading, “Berkeley Pit.”

This summer, the kids and I embarked on a 10,000-mile cross-country road trip from Washington to Maine and back. Along the way, we got a brief taste of America through landmarks and sights that represent our nation, for better or worse.

Read notes from every day of the trip:

Eastward: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Westward: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

And various posts from the FAQ.

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The Palouse

We started our road trip by leaving Washington through the town of Pullman. It’s located in the 19,000-square-mile geographic area known as the Palouse. It is miles upon miles of farms blanketing the hills with industrially-manicured fields of wheat, lentils, and garbanzos. This time of year, it is all green with new growth. Within a couple of months, it will have become “amber waves of grain” as the song goes.

I took the photo above from near the top of Steptoe Butte, one of the tallest spots in the Palouse. “Butte” is pronounced like the first syllable of “beautiful,” and it is somewhere between a steep hill and a small mountain. For an on-the-ground perspective of that very same terrain, here are a few minutes of driving through those hills.

Pullman is also home to Washington State University, where I recently began teaching... and during this summer, where I am not teaching. 

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Lolo Pass, ID

We passed into Idaho and headed up to Lolo Pass, deep in the Bitterroot Mountains. The ride was long and full of curves, as noted by this sign early on Highway 12: 

They ain’t kidding.

Lolo is a mountain pass on the border of Idaho and Montana, and a National Historic Landmark, as noted in Wikipedia:

“The pass is the highest point of the historic Lolo Trail, between the Bitterroot Valley in Montana and the Weippe Prairie in Idaho. The trail, known as naptnišaqs, or ‘Nez Perce Trail’ in Salish, was used by Nez Perce in the 18th century, and by the Lewis and Clark Expedition, guided by Old Toby of the Shoshone, on their westward snowbound journey in September 1805.”

We had intended to see the ranger station (which we did) and nearby Packer Meadows (which we did not).  Packer Meadows is a 160-acre field which, at this time of year, is full of blooming camas flowers. In fact, we arrived at during peak bloom.  However, we were pulling a trailer, and the ranger warned us that it would be extremely difficult to turn around on the narrow road to the field. He suggested that we park at the station and walk the 1.5 miles to the fields, but unfortunately, it was raining hard.

If we had seen Packer Fields, it may have looked something like this photo from the Missourian newspaper, but with heavy precipitation:

Photo by Olivia Vanni, Missourian.

Crikey. Our first stop and we’re already missing something. (insert sigh) But, we moved on.

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Berkeley Pit, Butte, MT

The Berkeley Pit is a former open-pit copper mine that has the dubious distinction of being one of the largest and most polluted Superfund sites in America. Atlas Obscura noted that it contains around 40 billion gallons of water with high concentrations of chemicals and heavy metals such as arsenic, sulfuric acid, cadmium, and more.

Per Wikipedia:

“When the pit was closed [in 1982], the water pumps in the nearby Kelley Mine, 3,800 feet below the surface, were turned off, and groundwater from the surrounding aquifers began to slowly fill the Berkeley Pit, rising at about the rate of one foot a month....

“On November 28, 2016, several thousand snow geese died after a large flock landed in the pit's water to avoid a snow storm…. An official report issued in 2017 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that the 3,000 to 4,000 snow geese that died at the Berkeley Pit were killed by exposure to sulfuric acid and heavy metals.”

There is a water treatment facility underway, but estimates vary on how effective it will be. If the polluted water levels continue to rise, it’s likely to reach the local water table sometime between 2020 and 2023 and begin polluting nearby water supplies and streams.

I took the photo above from the official viewing stand on a ledge over the pit, because of course there’s an official viewing stand. There’s also a gift shop.

“So you’re saying we shouldn’t go swimming here?” asked Luke, age 14, innocently.

“Only if you like dying quickly from chemical burns,” said Beth, age 11.

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Gardiner, MT

We ended in Gardiner, Montana. The town is the northern gateway to Yellowstone National Park, and was named after an early Yellowstone entrepreneur who sometimes went by the name of Jim Gardiner.

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Mais Cartões Postais para Clara

Cara Clarinha,

I am back in Port Angeles, Washington, after a lovely trip with my friends Mark and Jane who had gone camping and then came to Butte, to stay a few days and then give me a ride back to the coast.  We had good time in town, Mark shooting some things for me of the Berkeley Pit, to use for the Extractionexhibit in 2021.  Returning, we went on some lovely minor roads, including 40…