#berkeley pit

[macmanx]

America’s most toxic lake may also be one of its most overlooked resources. At the Berkeley Pit Superfund Site, scientists are extracting clean energy materials from a century of mining waste.

[eopederson]

Berkeley Pit, Butte, Montana, 1969.

[eopederson2]

Berkeley Pit, Butte, Montana, 1969.

Earlier mining at Butte had been subsurface, but discovery of high quality ore accessible from an open pit by a University of California professor, hence Berkeley Pit, led to open pit mining beginning in 1955. The open pit mine closed in 1982 and slowly filled with a toxic soup which, among other things, flows into the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. It has been said that migrating birds landing on the slop die shortly afterwards. A mitigation facility is under construction but will not be fully active for several more years.

[ageekyreader]

I posted a few days ago about the socially distant epic road trip The Candy Man and I went on ... and then haven’t come back with the promised pictures XD Not because I’ve forgotten! Nope, it’s because coming back from a really long road trip involves lots of picking back up the pieces and then I worked all weekend. I’m tired. The first set of pics is edited though so here we go ;) Plus some chatter about the trip in general. 

DAY 1 - OREGON TO SPOKANE: We started out the trip a little insane. It was a good omen of what the whole thing was going to be like lol We worked our normal Saturday, getting up at 4:30am and working until about 3pm. Unpacked the product from my van, unpacked the mini-van completely, and then repacked up for the trip and took off! We slept that night in Spokane. Around 6-7 hrs total with stops. DAY 2 - DRIVING ACROSS IDAHO AND MONTANA: We crossed the little upper part of Idaho, into Montana, and drove to Butte, Montana where we stopped at the Berkeley Pit. This was an open pit mine where they mined copper. It's now full of water and minerals and super acidic - about as acidic as lemon juice! It makes for all kinds of pretty colors, but those were kind of muted when we were there due to rain and a big storm brewing. [Note: I’m not endorsing pit mining in anyway. I’m pretty pissed about it in general, but I was pretty interested to see the resultant lake that is currently there.]

[image description: a man in a jacket is walking into a tunnel that has open wood gates and wood facing with a sign above it reading, “Berkeley Pit.”

[image description: A man in a rainbow mask and non-binary person with her hoodie up inside a tunnel. She is making a silly face.]

Yes, I’m a dork. And don’t worry, the mask went back on whenever there were people at all nearby  Behold the Pit! 

[Image description: The Berkeley Pit. Pictured here full of water and with a mountain and clouds behind it. The land is obviously scarred from the mining operations.]

[Image description: a closer look of one side of the Berkeley Pit lake. The scarring is even more obvious in this picture.] 

Again - it was pretty but also rather heart breaking. Ya’ll, our generation and future ones really need to stop fucking up the earth. 

[Image description: a non-binary person and a man grinning and being a little silly in a darkly lit photo with the Berkeley Pit in the background.]

[Image description: A better lit photo of the same two people smiling in from the viewing platform in front of the Berkeley Pit.] I remember feeling ridiculously happy and it had a lot less to do with our actual location and a lot more to do with the fact that it was our first real stop on the trip and I was super happy to be out on the trip with The Candy Man. 

[image description: the blog author framed by the entrance back into tunnel leading away from the pit.]

[image description: A man framed with the entrance and the platform leading back into the tunnel away from the Berkeley Pit.] We both loved this view and had to take pictures with it. I don’t know. I just loved it. And that I could take pictures.  One thing that I thought was really cool about this whole thing is that they have found some new organisms as a result of analyzing the lake that has formed there. And they have potential for helping cancer! It’s weird and wild and go look it up for yourself cuz I’m not good at explaining these things.  I was also really happy to learn that they are trying to clean up the environmental impact of all this mining, but I know they have a lot of work to do for that to happen and my heart bleeds for the surrounding area and the way it has been poisoned. 

[andimthedad]

Road Trip: Eastward Day 1: Palouse and Pollution

This summer, the kids and I embarked on a 10,000-mile cross-country road trip from Washington to Maine and back. Along the way, we got a brief taste of America through landmarks and sights that represent our nation, for better or worse.

Read notes from every day of the trip:

Eastward: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Westward: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

And various posts from the FAQ.

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The Palouse

We started our road trip by leaving Washington through the town of Pullman. It’s located in the 19,000-square-mile geographic area known as the Palouse. It is miles upon miles of farms blanketing the hills with industrially-manicured fields of wheat, lentils, and garbanzos. This time of year, it is all green with new growth. Within a couple of months, it will have become “amber waves of grain” as the song goes.

I took the photo above from near the top of Steptoe Butte, one of the tallest spots in the Palouse. “Butte” is pronounced like the first syllable of “beautiful,” and it is somewhere between a steep hill and a small mountain. For an on-the-ground perspective of that very same terrain, here are a few minutes of driving through those hills.

Pullman is also home to Washington State University, where I recently began teaching... and during this summer, where I am not teaching. 

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Lolo Pass, ID

We passed into Idaho and headed up to Lolo Pass, deep in the Bitterroot Mountains. The ride was long and full of curves, as noted by this sign early on Highway 12: 

They ain’t kidding.

Lolo is a mountain pass on the border of Idaho and Montana, and a National Historic Landmark, as noted in Wikipedia:

“The pass is the highest point of the historic Lolo Trail, between the Bitterroot Valley in Montana and the Weippe Prairie in Idaho. The trail, known as naptnišaqs, or ‘Nez Perce Trail’ in Salish, was used by Nez Perce in the 18th century, and by the Lewis and Clark Expedition, guided by Old Toby of the Shoshone, on their westward snowbound journey in September 1805.”

We had intended to see the ranger station (which we did) and nearby Packer Meadows (which we did not).  Packer Meadows is a 160-acre field which, at this time of year, is full of blooming camas flowers. In fact, we arrived at during peak bloom.  However, we were pulling a trailer, and the ranger warned us that it would be extremely difficult to turn around on the narrow road to the field. He suggested that we park at the station and walk the 1.5 miles to the fields, but unfortunately, it was raining hard.

If we had seen Packer Fields, it may have looked something like this photo from the Missourian newspaper, but with heavy precipitation:

Photo by Olivia Vanni, Missourian.

Crikey. Our first stop and we’re already missing something. (insert sigh) But, we moved on.

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Berkeley Pit, Butte, MT

The Berkeley Pit is a former open-pit copper mine that has the dubious distinction of being one of the largest and most polluted Superfund sites in America. Atlas Obscura noted that it contains around 40 billion gallons of water with high concentrations of chemicals and heavy metals such as arsenic, sulfuric acid, cadmium, and more.

Per Wikipedia:

“When the pit was closed [in 1982], the water pumps in the nearby Kelley Mine, 3,800 feet below the surface, were turned off, and groundwater from the surrounding aquifers began to slowly fill the Berkeley Pit, rising at about the rate of one foot a month....

“On November 28, 2016, several thousand snow geese died after a large flock landed in the pit's water to avoid a snow storm…. An official report issued in 2017 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that the 3,000 to 4,000 snow geese that died at the Berkeley Pit were killed by exposure to sulfuric acid and heavy metals.”

There is a water treatment facility underway, but estimates vary on how effective it will be. If the polluted water levels continue to rise, it’s likely to reach the local water table sometime between 2020 and 2023 and begin polluting nearby water supplies and streams.

I took the photo above from the official viewing stand on a ledge over the pit, because of course there’s an official viewing stand. There’s also a gift shop.

“So you’re saying we shouldn’t go swimming here?” asked Luke, age 14, innocently.

“Only if you like dying quickly from chemical burns,” said Beth, age 11.

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Gardiner, MT

We ended in Gardiner, Montana. The town is the northern gateway to Yellowstone National Park, and was named after an early Yellowstone entrepreneur who sometimes went by the name of Jim Gardiner.

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Unless noted otherwise, all photos are taken by the kids and I, and are shared under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

[earthstory]

Another part of the story of Montana is mining. This is the first of a couple videos I’ll show you exploring the Berkeley Pit near Butte Montana. Once nicknamed the “richest hill in the world”, the Anaconda Mining Company extracted a huge amount of rock from the ground and left a huge open hole in its place. That open pit mine has now filled with inflowing groundwater, creating a huge environmental hazard.

[earthstory]

Once the Anaconda copper mine closed, it began gradually filling in with groundwater. This satellite image series from Google Earth lets you watch the development of the lake at this site. As the lake grew, it interacted with minerals in the rock and produced acidic, highly toxic water sitting right next to the city.

[jonjost]

Mais Cartões Postais para Clara

Mais Cartões Postais para Clara

Cara Clarinha,

I am back in Port Angeles, Washington, after a lovely trip with my friends Mark and Jane who had gone camping and then came to Butte, to stay a few days and then give me a ride back to the coast.  We had good time in town, Mark shooting some things for me of the Berkeley Pit, to use for the Extractionexhibit in 2021.  Returning, we went on some lovely minor roads, including 40…

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