The Berkeley Pit: From Open-Pit Mine to a Lake That Must Be Watched Forever
For nearly seventy years, Butte made its living underground. Thousands of miners followed rich veins of copper deep below the hill in a warren of shafts and tunnels. In 1955, the Anaconda Company changed the direction of mining in Butte. Instead of going deeper, the company began to dig from the surface down, opening an enormous open-pit mine on the east side of the city. The pit took its name from the older underground Berkeley mine near the spot where the digging began.