Montana: Mountains, Mines & Sushi

From Billings, we drove to Bozeman, Montana. The drive to Bozeman hammers home the feel of “big sky country” of Montana, with snow capped mountains greeting you in the distance. It was homecoming weekend for Montana State University, so Bozeman was lively and festive on top of its usual charming self. We took a lovely one and half hour walk on one of the trails near town; it seemed too late in the day (and perhaps the season) to take on one of the many many other hikes around Bozeman. Alas, next time. 

The next day, we drove from Bozeman to Butte for a day trip. In 2012, Corey worked on the democratic senator Jon Tester’s re-election campaign in Butte (which Tester won by a nail-bitingly slim margin of 18,000 votes). He showed me the doors he knocked on, the coffee shop he frequented before the knocking on doors, and the casino he and his colleagues visited to kill time when the election results announcement was delayed due to the close race.

We also took a look at the Berkeley Pit - a former open pit copper mine right next Butte. The mine was operational between 1955 and 1982, and was flooded with water after operations ceased. It currently runs the risk of polluting the surrounding ground water with heavy metals by 2020 absent urgent and comprehensive clean up efforts, and is one of the largest federally-funded clean up operations by the EPA. It is so toxic as is that they have to periodically fire mock shots into the air so that birds don’t land on the water inside the pit and die. While the original mining company is contributing to the water treatment plans, it is quite unthinkable that the mine was operating with no closure and clean up plan in the first place - perhaps a sign that environmental protection regulation has covered much ground in the past 30 years or so. 

In the evening in Bozeman, we met up with one of Corey’s friends for dinner. A Bozeman native, he has moved back to Bozeman for quality of life after living in various other cities and states for work. He insisted that we eat at a sushi restaurant as a demonstration that Bozeman has world-class seafood even amongst the mountains - apparently the restaurant flies the fish from Japan twice a week and the sushi was indeed very tasty!