Butte sits just west of the Continental Divide in west-central Montana. It was a major gold/silver/copper mining boom town, and remains by far the most urban of Montana's cities. Butte sports a rock solid downtown and excellent urban housing stock (though in various states of repair), a unique look for such a mountainous location.
Butte's population is a little tricky. I've seen it as peaking at either 60,000 or 40,000 in the early 20th Century, before declining to 23,000 in 1970. After that, Butte merged with the rest of Silver Bow County, bringing the population over 30,000, but that includes all sorts of far-flung areas.
Read about the
Berkeley Pit. It's America's largest superfund site, essentially a ticking time bomb of an ecological disaster looming over the entire city and everything downriver. I did not happen to visit it while in town.
The “M” is for Montana Tech
Butte is over 5,500 feet above sea level.
It almost reminds me of a western Pennsylvania oil town in the Rocky Mountains
Part of the Montana Tech campus atop the hill
Evel Knievel is from Butte. That rules.
