Butte, Montana with Kids and Teens: Superfun and Superfund (and the Butte KOA)

travel dates: July, 2022

I couldn’t resist the Superfund wordplay in the title up there. I tried.

It’s true that we really enjoyed Butte, though, more than we thought we would, even though we didn’t get to do any of things we’d planned to do there.

Superfund is a program established by Congress in 1980 authorizing the EPA to clean up contaminated sites all over the US. And Butte was one of the biggest, most toxic Superfund sites of all, because it turns out that 100 years of unrestrained copper mining does bad things to the environment. I knew nothing about Superfund before Butte, but Ari, my college kid who’s taken a bunch of geography classes, was very excited to hear we were visiting a real life Superfund site.

We were intrigued enough by Butte’s history during our short visit that we spend much of the rest of the trip listening to the excellent podcast “Richest Hill” which details that history, how Butte came to be a Superfund site, and how that whole thing’s going now (or at least how it was going, in 2019/20).  And how is it going now? On the podcast, people tell stories about how your shoes would be eaten by acid if you played in the creeks around Butte back in the 70s and 80s. See that lovely green water up there? That’s the Berkeley Pit, a now closed open pit mine that’s famous for being so toxic it kills birds that land on it. Are things better now? I don’t live in Butte, so I’m not the best person to say. It’s clear that a lot has been done, but that it’s still a work in progress, even decades later. I did a quick search for recent news when I started writing this, and it seems that thoughts on the matter remain…complicated. Like the latest news is a bunch of stuff that’s come to light recently about how the EPA’s relationship with the current mining company in Butte (because open pit mining still happens there) has been a little cozier than is, perhaps, ethical. It’s fascinating and also more than a little unsettling to see Butte struggle with these issues (unsettling in part because none of us in the modern world are really free from worrying about this kind of thing, whether we literally live downstream from a toxic mine or not. We’re all at least figuratively downstream).

I’m going kind of heavy on the environmentalism lately on the ol’ blog! It’s funny because we tend to think of the west as full of pristine, pure spaces, but the reality is that a lot of these spaces haven’t been pristine in a long time, beautiful though they might be. Butte is one of 17 Superfund sites in Montana, and only 3 of them are listed as “construction completed.” Listening to the podcast, one of the scariest things to think about is that we can’t ever stop cleaning up Butte; there’s a new water treatment plant to deal with that green water up there, but it has to keep going forever because the water’s never going to not be toxic on its own. It’s sobering to think about how much capacity we have to unwittingly create incredibly long term problems for ourselves.

But the good news is that Butte is more than its Superfund status: it’s a vibrant, quirky city with a surprisingly robust tourism industry that meant almost everything we wanted to do was sold out when we were there just before the 4th of July.

The main reason I scheduled a stop in Butte at all (given how I didn’t know about Superfund when I was planning) was to see The World Museum of Mining. We’ve had good luck with mining museums in the past, particularly the one in Nova Scotia which comes complete with singing miners and extreme claustrophobia. Also, their tagline is “where history tells a story,” and history telling a story is one of my favorite things. But. The mining museum was, somewhat mysteriously, closed on July 3, our only full day in Butte. July 3 was a Sunday, so I had checked to make sure the museum was open on Sundays. And it was…except for July 3. It was also open on July 4, i.e. the actual holiday. When we realized this, we looked into getting tickets for Saturday afternoon after we got to the campground, but they were all sold out.

“No problem!” We thought, “you know what else has great reviews? The trolley tour! We hadn’t been planning to do it because it was going to be a little pricey for the 5 of us, but we were suddenly left with a full day in Butte with nothing planned, so…trolley tour! Only the trolley tour was sold out. Oh well. So! If you’re planning a trip to Butte, I hear that both the mining museum and the trolley tour are excellent! Plan ahead!

So we were left with a fairly chill day in Butte, as it turned out (until evening when the fireworks started. More on that later). We hung out at the campground. We went to the grocery store. We did laundry. We went to the visitor center next door to the campground.

We, of course, visited the Berkeley Pit:

Butte has taken some ribbing over the years for turning this abandoned mining site into a tourist attraction (including in this segment from the Daily Show), and it does feel a little weird paying admission to gaze at a toxic pit, but we did it anyway and have no regrets. It’s fascinating, oddly lovely, and it’s only $3. There’s really nothing do here other than gaze out at the pit and read a couple of signs (and maybe buy yourself a t-shirt in the gift shop), so you won’t need more than 20 minutes or so. And how are those birds doing these days? The ones who used to die in large numbers when they landed on the water? Well, the birds are doing a lot better now–not because the water won’t kill them, but because Butte employs a range of strategies to keep them from landing on the inviting looking, Statue of Liberty-colored water…including employing a guy whose job it is to watch for birds and shoot rifles into the air to scare them away.

We also checked out the Mineral Museum on Montana Tech’s campus, because it was open. This is another fairly quick stop, but they have a nice collection, admission is free (donations appreciated), and there are some great views of Butte and the surrounding area from outside the building that houses the museum.

You drive up a big hill through the downtown to get to the campus, which results in this view:

The museum is in a pretty building:

It’s not a huge place…mostly this one big room:

There’s supposed to be an earthquake simulator thing in here, but it wasn’t working:

Fun map of Montana on a wall outside the museum:

One of the benefits of all that Superfund money is nicely developed outdoor spaces. We stayed at the Butte KOA, and this walking trail through the Butte Wildlife and Bird Sanctuary was directly adjacent to the campground:

We and the dogs had a lovely walk there one evening:

you can catch a glimpse of RVs in the background of this one:

I’m including this picture because–see that white spot on top of the mountain in the distance? That’s Our Lady of the Rockies. You can take a tour and get up there to see the statue up close, but we opted against this, partially because of reviews that said things like, “The bus trip to the statue is over one of the roughest roads in the world.” But it’s yet another option for tourist type things to do in Butte.

Butte KOA

I’m going to go ahead and include our impressions of the Butte KOA here instead of in a separate post, even though this one is getting long. This KOA is listed as a Journey, which usually means things are fairly bare bones, but this one had quite a bit to offer for a journey, in our opinion. This is the campground that first introduced Abe to gaga ball, for example, and he spent quite a bit of time in the “pocket park” playing it with other kids. The pocket park had things like giant chess as well.  There’s also a nice camp store that sells beer and wine, a playground, and a pool (though it was closed for repairs when we were there). There are scheduled activities as well; when we were there they had a free hot dog dinner for all the guests.

Most of the sites are pretty standard KOA-type sites and fairly tight; we don’t always feel like springing for a patio site is worth the extra money, but we did it here and felt like it was worth it here to have some extra room to spread out.

One thing to note is that this was the first of a long line of Montana campgrounds with unusually late check in times. We’re used to check in times of 12 or 1, but it was 3 here (even though the check out time is noon). And we only had a 97 mile drive from our last stop (where the check out time had been 11), so that left us with a lot of time to kill. We called and asked if an early check in was possible, and they let us do 2 but no earlier (maybe if it hadn’t been 4th of July weekend they would have been able to be more flexible). We spent a lot of time at the Butte Wal-mart waiting to be able to check in. Just something to be aware of when planning. We paid just under $90/night for our patio site with 5 people.

But one of the big reasons I wanted to include the campground with the rest of the Butte post is that the most exciting thing we did in Butte was watch the fireworks right from the campground.

Cruddy iPhone picture that in no way captures the glory of Butte fireworks:

Now, I’ve seen a lot of fireworks in my day. I’ve seen 4th of July fireworks in many different cities and towns. I’ve seen Disney fireworks. I’ve seen Canada Day fireworks. So feel I can say with confidence that the fireworks in Butte are absolutely bonkers. We could watch the official city fireworks easily from the campground, and that show was long and impressive. But that wasn’t all. We could see (and hear!) full scale, professional level fireworks in every direction all night long. Just so many fireworks for hours and hours and hours. Fergus the nervous terrier was not happy. And I was a little over it by midnight myself. But I do think that the over the top extravaganza that is a Butte 4th of July (in this case the official show was actually on the 3rd) is worth seeing at least once. Lots of people were watching from the campground, either right from their sites or in chairs set up in public areas.

Next up: our favorite city in Montana!

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