After environmental problems closed the mines and hence the smelters back in the 1980s, The New York Times referred to Anaconda as “a company town without the company.”
It exudes the same downbeat, kick-me ambiance, but lacks Butte’s former grandeur– although Anaconda IS home to what was once the tallest smokestack in the world.
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The nearby town of Anaconda– where the Copper Kings built a series of smelters to process Butte’s ore– isn’t much cheerier.
Along descending, artificially-gouged mesas, old mining apparati still hunch above abandoned mine shafts like iron Tyrannosaurs devouring the earth. On the bluffs above the massive hole, the wind blows cold and lonely. The bleeding orange hole gapes 1.5 miles wide and 2000 feet deep and is filled with a cocktail so toxic that a mad scientist couldn’t have devised such a recipe. Drive about a mile out from the formerly stately main drag, and dirt roads will lead you right up to the precipitous edge of the most horrificly impressive abandoned open-pit copper mine in the galaxy. A place that other Montanans like to refer to by dropping the final “e.” In the atrophied, arsenic-laden heart of Butte, lovely brick Victorians crumble behind plywood, and once-grand hotels bustle only with spiders and wheezing ghosts. You’d be hard-pressed to find a town in America or in any other first-world nation as bleak and disheartening as Butte, Montana, a place that has literally digested itself.
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