Montana · Southwest Montana

Butte

The richest hill on earth, uptown’s historic district, and the most distinctive Montana city by architecture.

Butte is the city Montana's mining boom built — and the architecture shows it. Uptown Butte's National Historic Landmark District holds one of the largest concentrations of preserved late-19th and early-20th-century commercial architecture in the West, the legacy of the copper-mining wealth that briefly made Butte the most important industrial city between Chicago and San Francisco. The Berkeley Pit (the abandoned open-pit copper mine) is a strange, historically loaded weekend stop. Cannabis retail has settled in along Harrison Avenue and uptown, more thinly than Bozeman or Missoula but real. For adults 21+, Butte rewards the visitor who's interested in the Montana that shaped the Montana of the rest of the state: walk uptown, the World Museum of Mining, dinner at a saloon or supper club that's been there longer than most US suburbs, and a quiet night at the rental. Day-trip distance to Anaconda's Smelter Stack and the Pintler Wilderness for a hike.