Welcome to the Top of the World

By editor

Butte, Silver Bow County, Montana

Well now, if you’ve found yourself here, standing at the threshold of what is known as the Top of the World trail segment, congratulations--you’re about to step into a story bigger and stranger than any tall tale told down at the river bend. Montana’s Copperway is no ordinary path through the woods; it’s a sprawling network of trails and cultural sites crafted to showcase a history so thick with grit, gold, and grief that even the mountains seem to lean in and listen.

This particular stretch, the Top of the World, offers a fine collection of landmarks that tell the tale of Butte--the town that dug itself deep into the earth and the annals of American industry. Take, for instance, the Mountain Con. It’s one of Butte’s oldest and most productive mines--a place where men labored in the dark, chasing veins of copper that glittered like the promise of a new dawn. You can almost hear the pickaxes striking stone, the rumble of carts hauling ore, and the whispered prayers of those who hoped to strike it rich but knew better than to bet their lives on luck alone.

Not far from there lies the Granite Mountain Memorial, a sobering monument to 168 miners who perished in the Speculator Mine fire of 1917. A disaster so tragic that it seared itself into the memory of this rugged town. One imagines the smoky darkness deep within the mine, the desperate scramble for air, the agony of men caught in a fiery tomb miles beneath the surface. “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves,” said Sir Edmund Hillary once, but here, in Butte, the mountain sometimes conquered its own.

And if you cast your eyes beyond the memorial, you’ll see the Berkeley Pit--a gaping wound in the earth one mile long, half a mile wide, and 1,780 feet deep. It’s a former open-pit copper mine that ceased operations in 1982 but has since filled with water--water as poisonous as a rattlesnake’s bite. Every day, about five million gallons of groundwater trickle into the pit, carrying with it acids and heavy metals, turning the basin into one of the largest contaminated bodies of water in the United States. It’s an unnatural lake, a monument not only to human ambition but to the consequences when industry and nature collide without much regard for the rules of civility.

Once upon a time, this hill and its surroundings were covered by vast mineyards, sprawling operations that resembled small, fortified towns more than anything else. These mineyards were marvels of their era, employing cutting-edge industrial technology to extract the precious copper hidden beneath the Montana soil. Imagine tall wooden fences topped with barbed wire and electric alarms--“strike fences,” they called them--built to keep out not just thieves but the restless spirits of labor disputes. The miners and their bosses were often at odds, and these fences stood like silent sentinels during periods of unrest, protecting machinery and profits alike.

Each mineyard was a self-contained world, complete with buildings and workshops dedicated to every trade needed to keep the underground labyrinth alive. Blacksmiths hammered out tools, engineers kept the machinery humming, and clerks kept the books that told a very different story from the one told in the smoky bars and cramped boarding houses where the miners lived. It was a place where the grinding gears of industry meshed with the dreams and struggles of ordinary men--and sometimes, those dreams were ground up along with the ore.

Copper mining wasn’t just a business in Butte and the neighboring town of Anaconda; it was the very lifeblood of the region. The culture, the landscape, even the character of the people was shaped by the relentless quest for this reddish metal. When you walk the trails of Montana’s Copperway, you’re not just stepping through a patch of reclaimed land--you’re stepping through the pages of a story written in sweat, fire, and heartbreak.

In the early 1990s, recognizing the need to honor and preserve this heritage, Butte and Anaconda joined forces to create Montana’s Copperway. This initiative wasn’t merely about marking old mines or erecting monuments; it was about reclaiming a landscape scarred by a century of mining and smelting, and about telling a story that might otherwise be lost under layers of dust and forgotten years. As they say in these parts, “You can’t dig up the past without getting some dirt on your boots.”

And dirt there is, plenty of it--along with rusted rails, abandoned machinery, and ghosts of miners who once risked everything in the dark. The Copperway allows visitors to experience this history firsthand, to see the remnants of mineyards, to stand where men once stood, faces smeared with grime and eyes fixed on the promise of the next strike. It’s a place where the past isn’t politely tucked away but sprawls out in all its messy, magnificent glory.

Mark Twain himself might have chuckled at the irony of it all--how a town could grow so rich by tearing itself apart from the inside, how men could dig so deep into the earth and yet sometimes never find what they were truly looking for. He once wrote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” In Butte, those rhymes are loud and clear, echoing in the creaking of old mine shafts and the shimmering surface of the Berkeley Pit.

So, as you set out on the Top of the World trail, keep your eyes open not just for the spectacular views or the impressive ruins, but for the stories beneath your feet. Remember the men who braved the darkness, the families who waited with bated breath, and the town that grew stubborn and strong on the backbone of copper. Here, history is not a quiet whisper but a stubborn roar--a reminder that even in the wildest corners of the world, human ambition and endurance carve out their own strange and beautiful places.

Welcome to the Top of the World. Keep your wits about you, and don’t forget to look down once in a while--sometimes, the richest veins are right under your boots.