Berkeley Pit Viewing Stand
300 Continental Dr
Butte, MT
A viewing deck over a mile-wide flooded copper mine, a sobering monument to what Butte's ore built and what it left behind.
The Berkeley Pit is one of the most honest landmarks in the American West, a place that refuses to pretty up its own story. From 1955 to 1982 the Anaconda Copper Mining Company dug an enormous open-pit mine into the hill above Butte, pulling out more than 320 million tons of ore and waste rock. When the mine closed and the pumps shut off, groundwater began to fill it.
What rose in the pit was not a lake but a chemical bath, water turned acidic by exposed rock and loaded with dissolved copper, arsenic, zinc, and other metals. Today the Berkeley Pit is a federal Superfund site, and the only way to see it is from a viewing stand reached through a short tunnel, a deck that lets visitors look out over a mile-wide reminder of what mining gave Butte and what it took.
What Guests Love
- Standing at the rail over a mine pit more than a mile across and hundreds of feet deep
- The strange, beautiful, and unsettling colors of the water
- The plain-spoken history of Butte's copper boom and its cost
- Pairing it with Uptown Butte's remarkable surviving mining architecture
Worth Knowing
- This is a Superfund cleanup site, not a swimming hole; the water is genuinely toxic and off-limits
- The viewing stand is the only public access; you look at the pit through a tunnel and from a deck
- It is a somber, thought-provoking stop rather than a scenic one, worth approaching with that in mind
- Access is seasonal and can vary, so check before a long detour
Details
Butte, MT
Learn about Berkeley Pit Viewing Stand
The Richest Hill on Earth
Butte grew up on copper at exactly the moment America was wiring itself for electricity, and the demand made the hill beneath the city one of the most valuable pieces of ground on the planet. For decades miners worked a maze of underground tunnels, and the labor drew immigrants from Ireland, Wales, Finland, China, and beyond, giving Butte a raucous, cosmopolitan character unusual for the interior West.
In 1955 Anaconda shifted from underground mining to open-pit extraction at the Berkeley Pit, a cheaper method that literally ate the hillside, swallowing whole neighborhoods like Meaderville and McQueen as it grew. The pit ran until 1982, when falling copper prices and the closing of the local smelter brought mining here to a halt.
When the water came up
As long as the mines operated, pumps kept groundwater out. When the pumps were turned off in 1982, water began seeping back into the pit and the surrounding old workings. That water moves through rock full of sulfides, and the reaction turns it strongly acidic, which in turn lets it hold heavy metals in solution at very high concentrations.
The result is a body of water with a pH around that of stomach acid, carrying copper, arsenic, cadmium, zinc, and more. The pit is a centerpiece of one of the largest Superfund cleanup areas in the country, and a treatment plant now works to keep the rising water from reaching the region's clean groundwater. Scientists have even found tough, unusual microbes living in the toxic water, some of interest to researchers.
The danger is real, not theatrical. In December 2016 a snowstorm forced thousands of migrating snow geese down onto the pit water, and an estimated several thousand died. The operators now use hazing, with noise and lights, to keep migrating birds from landing.
Why it is worth seeing
The Berkeley Pit is not a scenic overlook, and Butte does not pretend it is. It is a place to stand and think about the true price of the metal that built the modern world, and about a city that has lived with both the wealth and the wound.
Seen alongside Uptown Butte, with its ornate old storefronts, surviving mine headframes, and the World Museum of Mining, the pit completes a fuller story than any museum could tell alone. It is one of the few tourist attractions in America that asks you to reckon rather than simply admire, and that is exactly what makes it memorable.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near Butte
World Museum of Mining
About 3 miles
A sprawling museum on a real mine yard, with an underground tour and a recreated 1900s mining camp.
Uptown Butte Historic District
About 1 mile
One of the largest National Historic Landmark districts in the country, a hill of ornate buildings and steel headframes.
Our Lady of the Rockies
Overlooking town
A 90-foot statue on the Continental Divide above Butte, reached by tour, with sweeping views.
Anaconda
About 25 miles
The old smelter town with its towering brick stack and a Jack Nicklaus golf course built on capped slag.