Around The Pit
April 24, 2025 at 03:30PM
Nicholas Triolo| Longreads | April 24, 2025 | 6,533 words (24 minutes)
This is an excerpt from The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere by Nicholas Triolo, which will be published by Milkweed Editions on July 8, 2025.
A great blue heron spears for minnows at the confluence of upper Silver Bow and Blacktail creeks, and Joe stands in the parking lot next to his pickup wearing a faded yellow ball cap, blue jeans, and a jean shirt. He pinches and pulls an iPad to review our route, which starts and ends here at the south end of the pit, a gash so big satellites can see it from two hundred miles above.
“This route is tricky as hell,” he says. “Tricky because there isn’t one.”
Joe and his wife Sherry moved to Butte, Montana, in 1990. He remembers the day that employees of the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), who once owned the open-pit copper mine, cracked hundreds of shotgun rounds into the pit to scare off migrating snow geese after scraping 342 carcasses from its surface like a routine pool cleaning. The geese had landed on the water and promptly poisoned their organs from the inside out. And Joe doesn’t know it yet, but a month from now he will wake to news of a second die-off, this time a thousand-strong skein. Joe understands the data, and he understands the danger, having worked here at the largest Superfund site in America for the past two decades. But today, he will walk directly into its shadow.
We had originally planned to make it a two-day linkup, bivying a night on the north end, but one week before, Joe changed his mind: “We can do this in a day,” he emailed. “I’ll feel like hell the next morning but it’ll be worth it.” In either case, to walk around America’s largest Superfund site presents three major risks. First, no one had ever attempted the route, twenty miles around and entirely unmarked. Second, the route requires trespassing, with heavy fines for violators. British Petroleum (BP), parent company to ARCO, now owns the property, and its grounds are highly patrolled. Third, the route includes several miles of bushwhacking, high-security fences, a crossing of the Continental Divide, and six miles of freeway walking. The attempt felt subversive in a way the others didn’t.
“You pack an empty bottle?” Joe asks me.
“Packed two,” I say.
Joe, I learned, had a more personal reason to attempt this circuit. Before Butte’s mining boom started in the mid-1800s, creeks tumbled freely off the Continental Divide to drain into the Clark Fork River, the Columbia, and, eventually, the Pacific Ocean. Upper Silver Bow Creek is the headwaters, our start and finish point, previously unadulterated until mining operations severed its flow. Today, Joe wishes to circumvent this industrial tourniquet. He plans to walk to the north end, fill a bottle with clean water north of the Superfund, and carry it the remaining ten miles to return it here, thus patching together a hydrological cycle that once flowed wild. Joe wishes to reconnect this broken circuit, if only for one reconciliatory moment. It means everything to him and nothing to anyone else. Except me.
It’s 7:28 a.m. when we begin walking clockwise.
“What the hell is that?” I ask, as we walk past a twenty-foot wall of black tar the length of a football field.
“Slag,” Joe says. “Byproducts after metals were removed during mining and smelted from ore. Metal and silicon oxides, mainly. You’ll see this shit heaped all across town.”
We cut through downtown as frost clings to eaves and lawns. A pink tricycle with white streamers leans on its side in the yard of a doublewide trailer, left out overnight next to a stack of hula-hoops. Chinatown. We pass the historic M&M bar, where Jack Kerouac had once stopped, later claiming that it was his favorite. It’s hard to imagine this city bustling with more than one hundred thousand residents a century ago, a swollen immigrant workforce filling its union halls, newspaper boys lugging headlines of World Wars in the crooks of their arms. Only thirty-five thousand people live here today, and the downtown sustains a whisper of convalescence from its muscular, industrial past.
Aluminum Street.
Gold Street.
Porphyry Street.
Mercury Street.
Clear Grit Street.
Storefronts are pulseless as we pass a corner market recast as a liquor shop. I imagine prostitutes puffing hash from its second-floor balcony and peering down on future clientele. Butte’s red-light district was known for employing more than a thousand unionized sex workers as Irish, Italian, Chinese, Finnish, German, and other immigrants flooded in with sights set on future prosperity, as if the underground flitted in something sacrosanct. This place promised a bountiful life, a bestselling action novel fast paced and plotted in vice, a Rocky Mountain casino met with a patriotic call to arm the war machine, to electrify freedom! with its endless metals, mainly copper.
Long before Europeans arrived here, the Snt’apqey, or Silver Bow Creek, offered abundance to the Indigenous Salish, Shoshone-Bannock, Pend d’Oreille, and Blackfoot for hunting and fishing. Butte’s settler history starts around the time of California’s Gold Rush. As Europeans pushed west in the 1840s, many never reached California, and those who did would find an oversaturation of mining claims and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Butte was a boomtown run by two copper kings—William Clark and Marcus Daly. After early prospectors discovered gold along this creek in 1864, merchant-banker Clark began to invest in regional claims. Irish-born Marcus Daly arrived shortly after from Nevada’s Comstock mine to purchase a $30,000 claim, the Anaconda, referencing a New York Tribune article by Horace Greeley on the Civil War: “Grant will encircle Lee’s forces . . . and crush them like a giant anaconda.”
In 1882, Daly discovered a thick vein of copper, and the timing couldn’t have been better. The telegraph and incandescent light bulb technology were just being introduced to the market and both demanded miles of copper wiring. So the two copper barons kept digging. And digging. Montana became part of the Union in 1889, and in less than ten years, Daly’s operations ran the state, amassing a tremendous infantry of workers and paid-off politicians. At one point, three out of every four Montanans worked for the Anaconda Copper Company. But such fortunes weren’t enough. Clark sought total conquest and tried to buy his way into political and media dominance during the 1899 election. Daly would sell Anaconda to Standard Oil, which owned most of America’s oil assets. By 1915, half of the US copper supply came from Butte. More than sixteen thousand workers called the city home, and Butte’s population ballooned to some ninety thousand people, the largest metropolis between Chicago and San Francisco.
As Joe and I cross town, heading north toward Walkerville, the morning air smells of autumn, of burn piles and composting duff. The pit disappears from view, but the haunt of it lingers with every step. Joe points to a memorial near the northwestern edge of the pit, where the Granite Mountain and Speculator headframes—large triangular steel pulley structures for hoisting metals from shafts below—once towered above town. Several decades ago, Butte was known as an ugly duckling, what Michael Punke in Fire and Brimstone called a city with an “expectation of imminent abandonment.” Arsenic smoke hung in the air like a perpetual fart while underground operations proved fatal, averaging a kill a week.
Such hazards came to international attention with the 1917 Granite Mountain and Speculator Mine disaster, the largest hard rock tragedy in US history. In three days, 163 men died after a fire broke out underground. By that time, ten thousand miles of shafts tunneled beneath the city, some more than three thousand feet deep. As the fire ripped through the tunnels, headframes hauled bodies up from below. Young men were stripped naked, charred and suffocated from the heat. Others were found holding each other, a final embrace before their skin started to fuse together. Dozens perished face down in the mud, their knuckles worn to bone after trying to claw an escape through concrete bulkheads a mile underground. Others were steam-scalded to death as rescuers tossed water from above to extinguish the flames.
This toxic hole is 7,000 feet long, 5,600 feet wide, and 1,600 feet deep, and it will be with us now for the next 10,000 years, at least.
The North Butte Fire was an industrial tragedy at unprecedented scale, triggering advances in workers’ rights movements. Butte became “The Gibraltar of Unionism,” with thirty-eight nationalities represented and a miner’s union. The International Workers of the World (IWW) showed up, led by Frank Little, a blue-collar “hobo agitator” and Chicago-based heavyweight, which made Standard Oil nervous. In 1914, the company hired thugs to dismantle workers’ demonstrations. One night they broke into a mining shaft, stole boxes of dynamite, and blew up Union Hall. Frank Little would later be found bludgeoned to death and hung from a railroad trestle on the Milwaukee Bridge. By Christmas 1914, Butte’s labor organizing was a heap of ash.
Everything changed following World War II, when advancements in open-pit mining technology developed elsewhere and Butte couldn’t compete, as the city literally sat atop its wealth. To dig a pit meant to relocate entire neighborhoods, something that didn’t stop the Anaconda Copper Company and their hunger for dominance. Six thousand family homes were promptly torn down, entire enclaves removed—Meaderville, McQueen, Dublin Gulch—and Butte’s open-pit chapter commenced, breaking ground with the Berkeley Pit in 1955. Over the next two decades, the pit produced 320 million tons of ore, 700 million tons of waste rock, and enough pure copper to pave a four-lane freeway from Butte to Salt Lake City. The Anaconda Copper Company would eventually fold after Chile nationalized their mining operations in 1971. ARCO acquired Butte’s operations to profit-scrap for another decade, before shutting down the nearby smelter in 1980 and, finally, the pit in 1982. On Earth Day.
The shuttering put an end to the constant pumping of toxic waters. The Kelley Mine pump station came to a halt. It had previously been removing several million gallons daily from underground shafts, and now the mines filled with contaminated water, which also filled the pit. Seasonal flooding continued to leach heavy doses of toxic metals from the pit into the Clark Fork River, poisoning aquatic life with a heavy burden of cadmium, arsenic, and mercury. With fish kills and widespread health concerns over a hundred miles downstream, in 1987, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated Butte/Silver Bow Creek a Superfund site, the single largest environmental cleanup designation in US history. This toxic hole is 7,000 feet long, 5,600 feet wide, and 1,600 feet deep, and it will be with us now for the next 10,000 years, at least.
I visited Butte’s subterranean world a month before the walk, via the city’s World Museum of Mining, which leads tours underground. Judging by the museum’s name, one might expect a global sweep of geologic history, but everything here centered Butte, a city once known as the center of the mining universe. My guide for the day was “Cincinnati Matt,” a Montana Tech geology undergrad from Ohio who looked the part: blue jeans, roughed-up hat with tortoise-shell sunglasses rested on its bill. Cincinnati Matt looked more excited about lunch than to talk rocks with our group of six.
“Did you know that, in 1914, nearly 80 percent of the world’s copper came from Butte?” he said, kicking dirt and adjusting his cap before droning on about copper’s ten-thousand-year history of human use, pendants found in northern Iraq dating back to 8700 BCE. Copper was pliable and plentiful, and for centuries it was traded alongside many other goods in Europe, North Africa, and Central Asia, though other metals were more coveted during this time. It wasn’t until the US Treasury began minting copper coins to replace bronze ones that everything changed.
Three mothers in the group asked questions about pioneers and engineering and the profiteering annals of extraction. Nothing about displaced Salish. Nothing about the war machine that gave rise to this place. Nothing about Superfund. Their children had no interest in this history either, and played tag under an aspen tree as we followed Cincinnati Matt to the underground portal, a corrugated metal tube set diagonally into the hillside and wide enough to swallow a school bus. One mother leaned over to apologize about her kids, but I welcomed their play as it distracted me from this boneyard of rusted nostalgia, backhoes and trolley systems and steel ingenuity, reconstructions of a mining town trying to relive its heyday like some washed up high school linebacker.
After entering the underground, Cincinnati Matt swung the portal shut and locked it. Pitch black, except for headlamps. We would travel just sixty-five feet below the surface today, nothing compared to the ten thousand miles of abandoned tunnels cut below and spread in every direction. I imagined this byzantine network flooded with iron-red water and navigable only by scuba, following an imaginary orb through this netherworld as the entire weight of the city bore down from above.
A miner’s ballad tacked to the tunnel wall:
My sweetheart’s a mule in the mine
I drive her with only one line
On the dashboard I sit
And tobacco I spit
All over my sweetheart’s behind.
The bestial tune held up a middle finger to the Anaconda Copper Company, known to brand their mules in the ass. To spit on their hindquarters was to deface company property. Miners starved these mules, blindfolded and flipped them vertical in cages to be lowered thousands of feet into shafts, where the animals would spend their lives hauling ore through tunnels in the dark. The mules never saw the light of day and most went blind, though some habituated to this back-and-forth extraction and would sit down in protest, unbudging once they had worked their eight-hour shift.
This version of the underworld complicated my childhood love for Jules Verne, for his fictional imagery proved warm and inviting, while this reality felt like a catacomb, like being swallowed by a snake. What had electrified the nation, what offered such light and connectivity, came from this hidden, wretched, dripping dark. The same might be said today, fossil fuels embezzled from these shadowlands and set to whirl aboveground for the express benefit of humans. Though Butte’s copper boom is now largely defunct, renewable energy barons are calling upon copper and other precious metals as solar and wind farms require millions of pounds of wiring, generators, cables, and transformers. To connect solar amps to municipal grids requires heavy demands of conduction—a well-designed solar photovoltaic plant, for example, might use nine thousand pounds of copper per megawatt. Copper wiring averages five times more in quantity for renewable systems than traditional energy sources, and most of today’s copper is mined in Peru, Mexico, and Indonesia, transported to a global market requiring fossil extraction.
But Cincinnati Matt didn’t cover this. Instead, we continued through the tunnel, sharing a scripted history of the many explosives, the evolution of drill bits, spiral cuts. At one intersection, we turned off our headlamps and stood there entombed in a sea of black. I followed the disembodied sounds of children whimpering and mothers apologizing as I balled my fists in thinking that, as we conquer mountains above, these tunnels invert that dominance, reaching into shadows now for the take. Clearly, we are not supposed to stay at the top, or at the bottom, of these tombs for long. These are lonely places, exposed and inhospitable. I stood in the dark as a chill washed over me, offering a whisper of courage to return back to the surface, to oxygen, to living things. We eventually clicked on our headlamps and followed Cincinnati Matt back to the portal to the place above, shimmering with animacy and fire.
After the first hour, Joe and I follow unmarked dirt roads lined in quaking yellow aspens, two miles north of uptown. Smells of a burn pile waft nearby. He stops at a fence stapled with a sign: “No Trespassing, Private Property,” below a surveillance camera watching us from a telephone pole. “Trespassing,” Joe says. “Now that’s up for debate.” Joe is referring to the false treaties and attempted removal of the Salish, Shoshone-Bannock, and Blackfoot tribes that lived in this region for several thousands of years before European contact. As our boots thud to the other side of the fence, a white truck approaches. “Security guard coming. Hide. Now.” Joe darts behind a sage thicket and lies on his stomach like it’s a military drill. We remain low and out of sight, huddled in the brush as the vehicle passes.
Three hours into the circuit and fully trespassing, Joe and I walk in silence in order to keep a low profile, contouring the northern arc of the loop and the tailing ponds, where we lose sight of the pit. There won’t be another look at it until the Continental Divide. A beaver dam blocks one drainage, terraced alder-gnaw slowing the water’s downstream fate. Through binoculars, I peer south to another dam, this one human-built, a 650-foot terraced berm that separates these tailing ponds from the pit. The shoreline shifts with life, though: a flush of whitetail, droppings of elk, tussle of red fox. It feels stubbornly animate despite the violation, despite three rifle shots that crack in the distance, reminding me that it’s prime pheasant hunting season. Cloud cover thickens the mood. One section cliffs out, forcing us to heel down to the pond’s edge in clear view of authority now, where we tack along a service road next to the tailings. No birds. No whitetail. No fox. Only bouquets of pale mullein and black witch’s fungus cluster along the bank, nature doing what it can to sequester life to the surface.
At one turn the road tapers to nothing, eroding into the tailing pond, The City That Ate Itself, a landscape of self harm, an ecological “sacrifice zone,” a phrase extended to the human communities here in Butte/Silver Bow County, with one of the country’s highest per capita suicide rates, double that of the national average. Though disproportionately male, suicides among women are rising here, too, while Indigenous communities continue to experience the highest per capita rates of self-harm. “It’s [enough] to keep our head above water, to keep our kids in clothes and hot lunches,” a mother said in an investigation of Butte’s suicide epidemic. Chronic pain is a main driver, which can lead to abusing prescription drugs like oxycontin. Eighty-two painkiller prescriptions are written for every hundred Montanans. Chronic pain leads to chronic drug use leads to chronic depression—more than a third of Butte’s residents show symptoms of depression—thus completing a vicious cycle that exhumes profit no longer explicitly from the depths of the Earth, but from the underworld shafts of the psyche. The pharmaceutical industry pocketed $1.25 trillion in 2019, profiteering that makes the copper kings look like children in a sandbox, fighting over plastic shovels.
Reasons for Butte’s runaway rates of self-harm remain opaque, but experts agree that it comes down to sustained socioeconomic hardship, pervasive opioid addiction, geographic isolation, and unmet intergenerational expectations, children not “doing better” than their parents. Here an inherited cultural bootstrap mentality encourages people to privatize anguish, to shove darkness underground where it belongs and get back to work. Butte Tough. Butte, America, residue from its mining origins, a fetishizing of the underworld as nothing if not transactional. Now that mining here is nearly nonexistent, avenues for developing a new sense of collective identity are beginning to shift.
“The words I often see when I review suicides,” one psychiatrist noted, “is that the person thought they were a burden.”
Burden, verb: Old English root. A load which is borne or carried.
Overburden, noun: inert waste or spoils from the soil that lie above a geological feature of commercial significance. Like a copper vein.
Interburden, noun: unprofitable material between two areas of economic interest. No purpose. Expendable. Erase the burden. Hide it away. Dump it into the tailing ponds, out of sight. Value identified and extracted with surgical precision, waste left for others to clean up.
“This is as good a spot as any,” Joe says as we approach the north end of the ponds. Ten miles and halfway around, his limp has downgraded to a hobble. I share the fatigue, but the hardest part remains around the bend. Joe slings off his pack, grabs his canteen, and slides into a willow patch beside the creek, where he dips it into the stream, looks back at me with his water raised high, and turns his whole face into a grin. Step one: complete.
I follow Joe’s lead and draw close to the creek’s edge, dipping my bottle into the water and capping it with mumbled prayer. Endings feed beginnings.
Nearby, a pump station clicks on to begin its scheduled treatment. “You know the process of treating this water will go on into perpetuity.” Joe says, the word shrapneled in p’s and t’s. Perpetuity. With constantly rising pit waters and Montana’s harsh climate, if rising waters were to carry toxins downstream again, as they did in the 1908 floods, restoration efforts here would be worthless. According to PitWatch, Butte’s leading local citizens education group, the “protective level” where pit water must be kept in order for it not to contaminate Butte’s groundwater is 5,450 feet. In 1994, the EPA and Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality required this line to be held at all times. This included diverting schemes to minimize overflow, as well as constant pumping and treatment protocols. The Berkeley Pit currently holds fifty billion gallons of toxic water in its bowels, water that enters primarily from the bedrock aquifer just below the alluvial groundwater. This system defines the “protective level”—insofar as contamination stays below this threshold, Butte’s groundwater remains intact. Even so, all of the city’s drinking water comes not from local water sources, but from three outside locations: the Big Hole River and nearby Moulton and Big Creek reservoirs. The point here is that all water pumping and treatment must continue into perpetuity.
“Wanna hear something a little woo-woo?” Joe says. “I often imagine this pump station as a post-apocalyptic monastery, like after a nuclear event or asteroid strike or a major die-off, where monks will be stationed here to live out their lives in retreat, practicing and tending to this pump for the good of the planet.”
I peer back at Joe’s post-apocalyptic pump house and imagine two saffron-robed stewards pacing out from their station-turned-monastery. The monks appear calm and resigned, each step known, a pace calculated, hands folded behind their lower backs like napkins—one palm wisdom, the other grief—knowing that any previous violations must now be accepted, tended to, and never repeated. One monk bends over, flicks a gauge, and continues on, while the other turns a valve to connect a pipe snaking off to another water treatment center monastery, where more monks congregate, more pray and tend to what remains. Slow. Attentive.
Joe’s imaginary pump house doesn’t surprise me after getting to know his story. The man was born in Washington, D.C., in 1950, an only child whose father was a pilot in the Second World War. The Griffins lived in Virginia for two years before moving north to Cambridge, Massachusetts, after his father was sent to Harvard Business School.
“My dad was a purebred Okie,” Joe tells me. His father had grown up in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, and would take Joe on hunting trips there as a boy. His mother was a city girl, Dorothy Vera Georgette, born of Bulgarian immigrants. She leveraged an English degree to teach elementary school her entire life, and Joe would inherit a love for poetry from her.
By the time Joe turned five, the family relocated to Southern California, zigzagging the Los Angeles basin to accommodate various military assignments. In Redlands, two hours east of Los Angeles, Joe would spend afternoons roaming the fragrant orange groves that checkered the land. Joe was a rebel teen who didn’t much enjoy school, so his parents decided to straighten him out at the Sterling School for Boys in Vermont.
“I was too much of a fuck-off.”
Joe’s saving grace was running and cross-country skiing, which placed him in regular contact with wild space. He recounts afternoons stripping off his school uniform with friends and sprinting bare-assed through the countryside, and his Nordic skiing career coming to an indefinite halt after he showed up to a race tripping hard on acid. “Came on pretty strong near the end,” he says with a laugh. Throughout high school he worked a job building wooden ladders, and his boss would mention how remarkable Montana was. Grizzly bears! Wilderness! And hippies!
FM radio had just started taking over the airwaves when Joe tuned in to an advertisement: The Band was headlining a festival in Montana. Three days. Mountains. Marijuana. Joe bought a one-way Greyhound ticket to Missoula and never looked back. When he started at the University of Montana in 1969, the first morning of class he strolled through campus and peered north into miles of wilderness.
“Say, what’s past those mountains?” he asked a passing student.
“There ain’t shit back there for hundreds of miles,” said the student.
Butte’s allure was clear for Joe. The town sat in the crosshairs of geology and public lands, which brought tension to his career, for he had spent most of his life outdoors—hiking, fishing, cross-country skiing on acid—but ARCO was now his employer, one of the single largest polluters on the planet.
This place was unlike anything he’d ever seen in California or New England, wildlands unfurled forever, run by predators and four seasons. Joe bounced between forestry and fine arts, which brought him into contact with three immediate loves: wilderness, geology, and his future wife, Sherry. Sherry Vogel grew up in Bozeman, three hours east of Missoula. A bookworm who majored in forestry, Sherry loved pine trees almost as much as she did poetry, and Joe was smitten from the outset. She graduated and moved to Gainesville, Florida, for work. Joe followed. He found a job there as an environmental consultant for oil drilling and mining sites. Joe was a geology nerd who preferred hands-on work, so consulting paid well and kept him outside, and close to Sherry. After five years, Joe’s employer opened an office in Butte, Montana, and his boss urged him to apply. Joe landed a job as well monitor for the Old Works in Anaconda, a now abandoned smelting site that had once serviced Butte in its heyday. Sherry and Joe left Florida in 1990. They would never leave Montana again.
Butte’s allure was clear for Joe. The town sat in the crosshairs of geology and public lands, which brought tension to his career, for he had spent most of his life outdoors—hiking, fishing, cross-country skiing on acid—but ARCO was now his employer, one of the single largest polluters on the planet. Joe learned that Butte was a fraught place, the pit only the visible portion of a complex subsurface tangle of groundwater interactions belowground. For much of his career he apprenticed with leading experts in the area, eventually becoming the lead monitor for the pit’s flood dynamics. It was only through analyzing these large data sets that he really began to notice Earth’s patterns, the language, the song.
Joe welcomed Butte as home, but Sherry wasn’t so sure at first, for she had grown up in Bozeman and spent her entire childhood snubbing it as a hellhole of fistfights and drunks. It took only a few months before she found her hackles raised whenever people would pin Butte as a cultural backwater. But their investment in this place grew over the years. Sherry would give birth to their son, and Joe toggled between corporate consulting and community water safety initiatives. After twenty-six years, they’d found home in a most unlikely place, someplace full of contradiction, beauty, and desecration, a place they grew to love and steward, despite its challenges.
What remains of the loop is an off-trail scramble over the Continental Divide, followed by a four-mile stretch of freeway that will slingshot us back to town. Though the pit closed operations in 1982, the nearby Continental Mine remains operational—copper and molybdenum, mainly —but drifting any closer would relocate our walk into the back of a police car. After scrambling up the side of a mountain cleft using saplings and granite nubs for leverage, we tuck behind a rock outcropping for lunch. From here the steep incline tells a deeper story of geologic uplift, sixty-eight million years deep, tectonic plates that shuffled beneath our feet as the great Western Interior Seaway cut the continent in half. This crust drew up toward cool surface temperatures above as it was repelled by heat from the mantle below, a geothermal tug-of-war.
Beneath where we stand, magma continued its heave from below, flows and pilings distributed everywhere, to the point where volcanic material formed a mass extending three miles thick and a hundred miles wide. This magma would firm into place and grow covered in soil, entombed as a subterranean hulk the size of Tennessee—the Boulder Batholith. Today, protrusions of this batholith poke through the surface, while most of it remains underground, settled alongside another mass of cooled magma called the Late Cretaceous Butte Quartz Monzonite. Large veins of igneous fissures and hydrothermal pressure release valves continued to send heat up from below. Lighter, flimsier minerals like copper and silver accumulated and were trapped in oxidizing ducts, where they nested for millions of years.
Standing on an overlook spooning gobs of leftover tikka masala and jasmine rice from a mason jar, for the first time I can see the full route: Downtown. The pit. The tailing ponds. The 650-foot dam. Joe’s post-apocalyptic pump house. The Continental Mine. There’s so much beauty in all this terror, I think, hating myself for thinking it. The Industrial Sublime. It all feels so wrong and yet so simultaneously harmonic. I imagine this place as one living, breathing cell replete with all third-grade biology class functions: mitochondrial roads shuttle dump trucks to remove waste; cytoplasm and ribosomes as tailing ponds for storage; warehouses pulverize rock to access their energetic payout, its lysosome; and the nucleus in the middle, the pit, an eye around which spins a dark seed full of sulfuric acid, deep frying anything that comes too close. For the first time, by slowing down, I am able to see the true circumference: a mountain turned inside out, quickly conquered and abandoned.
“We made it!” Joe says. “The crest of the continent.”
After an hour of bushwhacking, we reach the Continental Divide, 7,200 feet, our route’s high point. Rain clouds darken and wind vaults thirty miles per hour across the backbone of North America. Within a thumbnail of difference, water drains either west to the Pacific or east to the Gulf of Mexico. We’ve reached Rampart Mountain, which towers over the entire Superfund complex to surveil a story versed in deep time: the time of erosion; the time to build a planet, a brain, a human heart; the time for mountains and rivers to form; the time for beaver steppes to mound; the time for our curious species to emerge and poke their fingers in soil and find shiny deposits wedged in thermal vents and name it “profit,” and, in less than one hundred years, leave a hole that will require constant tending for hundreds of generations.
But maybe even that is inaccurate, for this place won’t persist forever. After we are long gone, the pit will eventually fill and flood and drain and poison everything downstream, until it flows into another restart. I am constantly reminded by my circumambulations that every path is cobbled in bone, perpetual beginnings and endings, and to steward such ecological violation at this hyperobject scale is something we’ve only recently been able to set into motion—ocean acidification, climate change, nuclear waste storage—all of it offering mirrors to our own hubris, and these pits are perhaps necessary to see our shadow selves more clearly. Shadow zoos.
David Abram writes in The Spell of the Sensuous: “To Indigenous, oral cultures, the ceaseless flux that we call ‘time’ is overwhelmingly cyclical in character . . . Time, in such a world, is not separable from the circular life of the sun and the moon, from the cycling of the seasons, the death and rebirth of the animals—from the eternal return of the greening earth.” Here, Abram suggests that to think ecologically is to “find oneself in a world of cycles within cycles within cycles,” which, I realize now, is what’s at the core of this two-decade obsession with walking in circles. It has taken me this long to begin locating myself rested within these cycles, a seasonality subversive in its contention with the linear-dominant narrative demanded by modern life and mirrored back here, along the Berkeley Pit’s rim. I’ve only begun to hear this old geologic song. I’ve only begun to dance.
We descend from the high point following transmission lines that guide us thousands of vertical feet to the valley floor, opposite the pit, where a headwind bellows in our merging afoot onto the I-15 freeway, the most dangerous stretch of the route. This is the safest way to link back to town without staying on the ridge, which would draw us too close to the Continental Mine and likely put us in jail.
Found objects along the freeway:
one shit-encrusted diaper
seven plastic Fireball whiskey bottles
thirteen Keystone Light beer cans
six Monster Energy drink tallboys
Uppers and downers. How we love expediency. How we love getting off by getting going.
After an hour of walking on the freeway, Butte comes back into view as the round enters its tenth hour. We take the first exit, hop a high-security fence, and traverse a field of sagebrush toward the confluence. Joe’s limp drags as we drop into the backyard of a suburban home where a woman watches Fox News, something about Donald Trump’s rise. Clean coal. Fake news. Passing the Chinese buffet where Joe and I first met, a chef sits on his haunches sucking on the glowing nub of a Lucky Strike. Joe’s whole face smiles as he calls Sherry to let her know we’re alive. “We’re home!” he says. I find myself envious of his commitment to this home, despite its overwhelming toxicity. But maybe that’s what makes a home worth living in, to turn toward both its beauty and its trauma, to hold them in the same animal heart, and to have the staying power to endure.
To my right is one of the largest manmade toxic holes on Earth. To my left, shelves of coal-colored slag piled twenty feet high. And underfoot, ten thousand miles of poisoned shafts swimming with ghosts.
“We’ve gotta own this pit,” Joe says to me. “It’s not going anywhere. It’s a commitment, but we have to own it now.” The two of us walk single file along a busy frontage road. “I’ve made my whole living off this pit, so I see it as a sort of sacred act at this point.” He looks out at the city. “Man, I’m excited about Butte. There is a total repackaging going on here. Folk festival is world-class. Art scene picking up. Great mountain biking and cross-country skiing. Young people trying to make a life out here. It’s just such a beautiful location, I mean look around!”
I swivel around and still cannot fully understand. To my right is one of the largest manmade toxic holes on Earth. To my left, shelves of coal-colored slag piled twenty feet high. And underfoot, ten thousand miles of poisoned shafts swimming with ghosts. I catch a glimpse of the Anselmo headframe in the distance and remember the charred men underground in the 1917 fire, the workers riots, Frank Little hanging bloated from a railroad trestle. There are so many reasons to hate this place. I find myself in a cycle of revulsion-escapism again, turning from a place, or a Self, replete with trauma, razed forests and boiling seas and choked air. How do I come back to a planet in equivalent disrepair? How do I come home to a place I’ve never left? The pit’s invitation is subtle: Don’t look away. Come closer. Slow down. Look beneath. Now get to work.
We had walked twenty miles around the country’s largest Superfund site, and Joe remains allegiant to keeping this place alive as best he can, for to turn away now is to disavow a violation that is of our own making. To steward what beauty remains, to protect ecological functions into perpetuity, requires us to face this damage head-on and flag each misstep along the way so it never bears repeating. Escape is no longer an option; there is nowhere else to go. The Japanese poet, Shinkichi Takahashi, born on Shikoku Island, site of a thousand-mile, eighty-eight-temple Zen circumambulation, wrote: “The wind blows hard among the pines / Toward the beginning / Of an endless past. / Listen: you’ve heard everything.”
Joe and I reach the confluence of Silver Bow and Blacktail Creeks after having drawn a new circle, and violet skies meet our arrival. My feet squish with blisters as Joe pulls out his canteen and walks to where the two creeks collide. Here is a person who reflects this very place: someone converged and conflicted, industrial conspirator and citizen protectorate. Joe squats by the water’s edge, closes his eyes, takes a deep breath as sun glitters off the creek’s surface to fill his canister with diamonds of light. Willow and alder bend closer to witness as minnows stir in eddies below, stroking new life. Joe opens his eyes to dump the water into the creek, and the offering ripples outward.
To walk around a pit, bushwhacking past surveillance cameras and warning signs telling us not to continue, but to go anyway and fetch a jar of wild water and walk it around to the present, to irrigate an unknown future, is carrying both pleasure and pain, renewal and extinction.
Now it’s my turn. I pour my bottle into the stream, watch as it’s taken in by the headwaters, and our mission is complete in that moment. The circle is unbroken, mending something for one shimmering, inconsequential moment. I realized that to come down from the mountain is to instead walk slowly alongside these complicated and unanswerable ecotones of grief, wonder, and humility. I’ve only begun to move around this interior place.
Endings feed beginnings. May I release the summit. May I set down this imperial hardware and move along my own circumference with stubborn endurance and surrender, driven by humility, compassion, and staying power. Maybe it’s all too late to retrieve what’s been lost in all our take, but that doesn’t deflect the central task of the circumambulator: to find embodied practice that resituates humans not as center, but as one of innumerable centers of gravity in this moment—Earth dethroned as center of the universe, humans dethroned to relinquish their gaudy headdress and feed it back to the pitted source as an offering and a homecoming. This is the way around, I’m learning, to follow these rounds until our crown spins from arrogance and toward honesty, to reciprocity, choosing routes and shapes that bring us most alive and that direct us back to nowhere and everywhere, toward the familiarity of a beginning that never ends.
The sun is down. I look around for a sign, for that great blue heron to flap her wings in affirmation, but nothing so poetic arrives. Instead, I offer myself as witness to the ripples that continue to widen and meet the creek’s edge before dispersing downstream toward some new beginning. Joe and I embrace. His shirt smells of an endless wind.
Copyright © 2025 by Nicholas Triolo. Published 2025 by Milkweed Editions. All rights reserved.
Nicholas Triolo is the author of The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere. His writing and films have been featured in Orion, Outside, The Dark Mountain Project, Terrain.org, Emergence, Wild & Scenic Film Festival, Patagonia’s Dirtbag Diaries, and others. He’s the managing editor for Salmon Nation Trust’s bioregional storytelling platform, Magic Canoe, and was previously senior editor at Outside, digital strategist at Orion, and editor-in-chief for Camas. Triolo lives in Missoula, Montana, and you can find more of his work at nicholastriolo.net.
Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/24/butte-montana-mining-superfund/
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