Butte, MT

In Butte, the biker comes off I-15 & I-90 at Exit 127 - Harrington Ave. Only in this area does the biker rides the interstate shoulder due to the enormous mining hole in the ground here. At exit 127 there is a Super 8 and several other motels. We stayed at the Super 8, which has laundry facilities. There are restaurants, a gas station, and just down the road a bit is a bike store - The Outdoorsman - on Harrison Rd. It is closed on Sundays. You can't help but see the immense hole in the Earth from just about anywhere you are in Butte. It is the remnants of a copper mining operation. It is now filling in with water. If you go to Park Ave. you can actually go to an observation deck to look into the "hole" of the Berkley Pit Mine. Its worth the look - pretty amazing! Butte claims to have the largest historic district in the US. 4,500 structures. There is a trolley you can take a 1 1/2 hour tour of the town on. There is a nice visitors center off Montana Ave. - just off I-90 & I-15.
BETH writes of today - Tired and sore I awoke to the first cloudy Montana morning - this was not what I had hoped for. Mom lifted my spirits by cooking a fine breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast while Ann and I packed the dry tent before it rained again. Soon I was off in the drizzle to soft muddy old railbeds. Fortunately, that did not last long and I had never been happier to see the road. An easier 29 miles and my bike computer started working with about 8 miles to go. I arrived in Butte at about 2pm to a hot shower in the Super 8, left over pizza and Mom and Ann laughing at my order from McDonald's of a coke and a strawberry shake. What can I say I was still hungry. We spent the VERY rainy afternoon dry inside the Montana School of Technology's very cool Mineral Museum - what a collection! They also had some fun maps about the geology and thermal spots of Montana and the Planet. After the museum we headed for the all famous eye sore of Butte, the Berkley Pit. The pit is the site of a mining operation that was started long ago and was finally stopped in the early 1980's. This pit - 5,000 ft wide, 7,000 ft long and 1,800 ft deep was mined mostly for copper, but also zinc, silver and gold. What was astonishing to me was the amount of Earth a population of people is able to move and now the mess that the city has to deal with. The water that has filled the pit has a pH of 2.5 - death so they have to keep the water level below their water table or the water in the city and surrounding communities will be undrinkable. What a mess, but a huge part of Butte's history. An interesting town!