Smoky Anaconda

Silver Gate to Anaconda, Montana, 251 miles.
One of the (many) strange things about the way I travel is that I often don’t know where I will sleep, or exactly what route I will take, until I get to there. A lot of people don’t believe me when I tell them this but it’s true. I just kind of pick a general direction and start going. I am always fairly certain to encounter either a place to camp or perhaps a nice cheap hotel somewhere. This is a lot more potentially problematic in Latin America, or in other third world places where banditry, lack of infrastructure, or other obstacles abound. But more often that not it’s really pretty easy. Besides, in places like that it’s often impossible to call ahead for reservations, and what do you do if you encounter a problem on the road and can’t make it to the hotel as planned? Best to just wing it. Something always appears—the universe provides, as it were.

Sometimes I do have a friend house or some other destinations along the route as way points, but in fact I much more often find myself in situations that are unknown or unexpected. They are often routine or not worth mentioning, just another roadside hotel or typical camp site, but sometimes they are so interesting and unusual as to appear almost… providential. Which is how I made my way to Anaconda.

When I woke up I prepped my gear and was given a quick tour of the Ridge Riders Lodge by Julie Griffin, a Southern girl who’d come to work for the summer there. Rough-hewn and quaint, the old Lodge was built in the 30’s and supposedly a favorite of Hemingway, and may even have been where he wrote part of Old Man and the Sea. At the very least a flashback scene from the book "For Whom the Bell Tolls" takes place near there, where the main character, Robert Jordan, drops a pistol into the frigid mountain waters. Inside were a series of murals depicting native American life in various seasons. They were hung below the second floor railings, and were dated 1956. The story goes that the artist came and ran up a large bar tab and offered to pay it by making the paintings.

The lodge is nestled among the mountains next to several cabins that were built a few years later. The fire of 1988 nearly destroyed it all. The residents saw it coming and built firebreaks, incorrectly, and the fire jumped right over them. The old buildings appeared to be doomed, when suddenly the wind shifted and forced the fire up the hillside away from them. These historic cabins avoided destruction by just 100 feet! You can see the proximity of the fire by surviving tree line below.



The lodge has no heat, so it’s kept closed during the winter because it’s too cold. I was told the story of the time one of the employees arrived to open it up in the Spring, and his dog wandered off inside. A few moments later the dog reappeared, chasing a bear straight out the door.

Yellowstone park was stunning, but it had a certain sterile quality that’s difficult to describe. There were beautiful rock formations, tolkienesque craggy peaks and boulders strewn across the valleys (left there by passing glaciers no doubt). There were bison, deer, and bighorn sheep wandering freely. The animals had the run of the place, which is as always great in a park. As I rode along I noticed a ranger hauling a dead deer onto truck. I passed more gorgeous scenery. There were creeks with boulders the size of golf carts and SUVs inside. Every inch of the pristine cleanliness seemed too ordered to be real; like a Disneyland version of wilderness perfection, or a forest pretending to be a golf course. Bambi never had it so good. I mean even the dead are carried off so as not to spoil the view! (Or the bouquet.) Don’t get me wrong, the park is incredible and definitely worth the $20 entry fee just to ride through it, but it’s a bit strange that it should be so manicured and shellacked. Parks I saw in other places, such as the Teddy Roosevelt National Park, has similar attentions paid them by the rangers, but they somehow felt less artificial. I imagine that it must be incredibly difficult to keep a place that sees over three million visitors a year unspoiled, and for that I applaud them. Indeed, there is so much to see and do in the park that it’s impossible to see hardly any of it by driving through.



The fire of 88 hit Yellowstone as well, and there were hillsides with rows of burnt trunks still standing. Almost twenty years later and hardly a sapling has come up to replace the dead pines. Around the hills can be seen more of the semi-burned pine logs, strewn about like spilt pins. Strange that the part that was destroyed by fire and left to it’s own devices is also one of the park’s more natural looking places.

As I exited I passed a bridge over a the Gardner river, one more idyllic little gem in this over-precious park. Not far from there was a sign indicating I’d crossed the 45th parallel, the exact midway point between the Equator and North Pole. I wonder how many times in life we cross such places and never know it? How many times have I been higher than Everest in a plane, for example? Or for that matter, even more mundane things such as how many gallons of water have I ingested? It would be neat if when we die, we get to see a scorecard of all the strange trivia of our lives.

In Bozeman I finally picked up my cell phone, forwarded to the post office by my sister. I stopped along the road later and made a lot of phone calls, just because I could. Seventeen miles outside of Butte, along Interstate on 90, there were rocks that made strange shapes and bizarre images as I passed. Very cool! Faces, spines of dinosaurs, animals, bubbles, butt cheeks, bent knees, and odd art were all formed in the medium of fuchsia rocks.

Just past the continental divide I veered off 90 toward the mountains on smaller roads, hoping to cross over into Idaho and get that much closer to Seattle, my next planned stop. Along the way there were some signs. They read: Opportunity, 1mi, and Wisdom, 50mi. Feel free to insert an appropriate comparison here for yourself.

As the sun began to set I knew I’d have to stop soon. I was hoping to take the Shalkaho pass but I was advised not to go up there to camp because of the fires that had been blowing through. These same advisers also said it would be too cold to camp. On August 15th! How cold could it be? The latter reason didn’t bother me but the former did, so I took a room in a local motel for $50.

That was when I noticed the smelter. On the way into town the tremendous mountains of slag were readily visible from the road, but unless you’ve read about it, there’s precious little around to explain where they came from. And there’s even less to explain the absolutely monstrous towering chimney sticking up out of the hills. This was the former home of the Anaconda Copper Company, which is now shut down and is the assets and property are owned by BP Amoco. It is also currently the largest superfund cleanup site in the country. This whole situation may be best summed up with the back cover text of an interesting book called Smoke Wars: Anaconda Copper, Montana Air Pollution, and the Courts, 1890-1924:

The copper mining and smelting communities of Butte and Anaconda, Montana, today host the largest Superfund cleanup site in the United States. Hazardous waste and companies that place profit before environmental concerns have long plagued Montana's mining and smelting industries, according to this provocative history of air pollution. Smoke Wars begins with the fight in Butte to abolish heap roasting -a process that created dense clouds of low-lying, noxious smoke and caused death rates in Butte to exceed those of New York City in the 1880s. While a hard-fought public victory forced smelters to end the practice, Butte's air pollution remained notorious until industry consolidation caused the transfer of most smelting operations to the great reduction works in Anaconda, twenty-six miles west of Butte. Smelting in Anaconda led to the second phase of the smoke wars -the opposition led, this time, by farmers in the Deer Lodge valley whose livestock and crops were dying from exposure to the arsenic and sulfur dioxide released from the tall stacks of the Anaconda Reduction Works. Finally, the federal government entered the fray -protesting damage to the national forest. Even the federal government was unable to force Amalgamated Copper—or the Company, as it was known throughout Montana—to control its toxic emissions. With lessons for the current environmental movement, this landmark study raises issues of corporate responsibility, the rights of citizens, the costs of industrialization, and the relative value of the environment, issues still hotly contested today.

Some quick questions resulted in being directed to a small park dedicated to the site. Apparently it’s not enough that the whole town is smothered in black hills leeching antimony, arsenic, mercury, and other nasties into the groundwater, but now the people can come and play right next to the poisons in a commemorative park to further celebrate the town’s glorious exploitation by the wealthy mining industry. Yay!



The smelting tower is colossal. It used to be the tallest stack in the world, but now it’s the second or third. It’s nearly ¾ height of the Empire state building, probably just as tall if you were to remove the Empire State’s spires. The Washington monument could fit inside it the smelter with room to spare. It now looms unused on the black hills like some gothic tower of Mordor. They don’t know what to do with it. The locals complain; some want it torn down, but the old-timers want to keep it. They tried to get people to come and do base jumping off of it as a tourist attraction, but all the high power lines prevented it. The town isn’t ugly, but it’s about the farthest thing from a tourist hotspot as you can imagine--although I did manage to get some pretty pictures. If you go to visit, just make damn sure not to drink the water.

posted by goat hill dreamer @ 5:55 PM