Dualsport Diary: Continental Divide ride 2018: Part 5

Part 4

With Jeff's DR650 out of commission because of a fried clutch, and replacement parts arriving in Jackson, Wyoming in 4 days, we had to change our plans to make the most of our forced delay. Otherwise, we'd face the unwanted prospect of cutting our overall route short--and that would be a real disappointment, because the apex of our loop was far ahead at the high passes of the Rockies in Colorado.

After much debate, we agreed that renting a car and driving to Jackson via Yellowstone would be a decent consolation prize, with the bonus of having some time to visit the Butte mining museum before heading out of town. It was a sensible decision, and after several tiring days in the dust and heat, the prospect of air conditioning, tunes, and not being patinated by sweat and grime seemed downright appealing as well as a bit of a culture shock.

Getting a rental car proved unexpectedly challenging, as there was a major festival in town and the only rental options were at the Butte airport. Pete and I took advantage of a Hampton Inn free shuttle to the airport (thanks again, Judy!), arriving to find that the terminal was both a remarkable work of architecture and completely deserted. No planes, no passengers. Nothing. Just one person staffing the car rental booth, and one other customer equally concerned about securing a car. We got the last vehicle available in town, and amazingly, it was an SUV that fit all our gear.

A nice display of minerals stoked our curiosity about visiting the Butte mining museum.

With the car packed and our bikes parked at the Hampton Inn for the next few days, we headed off to look around town and geek out at the mining museum - a trip highlight for me.

First up was the visitor's centre overlooking the main mining site. Today, the ores are being actively mined through open-pit techniques, but scattered throughout the site are many remnants of the original mines, with prominent head frames that led down to thousands of miles of underground workings. Here is the head frame of the Badger copper mine, one of the oldest continuously operating mines in Butte (from 1883 to 1966), and which reached a depth of 4,169 feet.

Butte was very much a multi-cultural city during its heyday, attracting workers from all over the world. This overlook with flags of the different nationalities that worked the mines was constructed with core samples (the cylindrical features) drilled from the hard rock.

Tragedy lurked at every step though, with one of the most horrific accidents in mining history happening right here.

This engraved stone shows the depth of the workings where the fire occurred--at the 2600' level of the Granite Mountain shaft.

Letters recovered from some of the miners paint a moving picture of the unimaginable suffering, horror, and impending doom experienced by those trapped underground.

Although we didn't visit it, nearby is the Berkeley Pit, the remains of one of the main copper mining operations that left a 1,760' deep hole in the earth and an impending environmental disaster from the highly acidic water that's now filling the hole and threatening the regional aquifer. So much to see for another time!

Next we went to the World Mining Museum, located at the site of the Orphan Girl mine, with much of the equipment and buildings left in place when mining operations ceased in 1970. The museum had a fantastic collection of old buildings and artifacts moved to the site, and is well worth a day-long visit. Although it's also possible to tour the underground workings, there were no tickets left on the day we were there.

Unfortunately, none of the display buildings are open to visitors, but peering through the windows revealed some impressive glimpses of what life could be like for the different levels of society during the town's Victorian peak.

Butte hosted an impressive maze of ever-changing rail lines above and below ground to bring supplies to and remove ore from the various mines all jammed together on the Hill. Here's a map of some of the confusion:

Today some sections of track remain, with an early steam locomotive used to shunt ore cars parked on an old spur at the Orphan Girl.

More modern diesel-electric engines were parked further along:

Beside the spur was the remains of the old dry-house where an incinerator and boiler (located in the brick structure) made steam and hot water for weary miners to shower and dry their work clothes after a shift. The tracks above were used to feed scraps of wood from the extensive timbering operations (e.g. off-cuts from the timbers used to shore up the tunnels) located nearby, which also had the benefit of keeping the site clean of wood debris.

Here's the dry house in the distance, with the tracks from the timber shop. To the right is the head frame (not shown).

And there it is: the Orphan Girl head frame, now and then. Up close, you could smell the old grease and ore dust.

Three shafts plunge 2700' straight down into the rock. On the right is the car that miners would descend in; the middle shows a similar car with an ore cart in place; the left shaft has a larger ore recovery system in place.

This is a nifty 3D representation of the ore veins and shafts of the Orphan Girl mine, showing the main shaft and various drifts at 100' depth intervals to access the vein and remove the ore by blasting it out from below.

It's hard to fully grasp the extent and complexity of underground operations of a typical mine here. The following models were built by insurance companies in the early 1900s to represent the different shafts and drifts of two mines as part of legal proceedings against the mine operators. Each "stick" is labeled and represents an individual shaft or drift cut into the rock like so many ant tunnels, with red areas representing the stopes or areas where ore has been removed.

When you multiply this example by the hundred-plus mines in the area, it's easy to see why there are thousands of kilometers of workings beneath Butte.

Each of those ant-traces was filthy, hot, wet, and dangerous in reality.

Here's a mechanized "mucker" which rode on rails and scooped up the blasted ore and waste rock for either removal to disused tunnels, or to above-ground processing or dumping sites.

Even the toilet traveled on rails!

Each level of the mine had its own railway network and traffic control system to prevent collisions, as shown in this lighting board used to represent the location of ore trains on the 500-600' level.

Timbering thousands of kilometers of tunnels to prevent the rock from collapsing required forests of logs cut by automated saws into standard parts, using ingenious joinery that enabled the posts and beams to be assembled quickly and securely underground.

Of course, with so much rock being moved, massive power was required to winch the equipment and workers down, and ore up.

This was the main head frame winch:

And, if I recall correctly, this was one of the main air compressors used to power the mining drills. It was driven by a 150HP electric motor. Thousands of these compressors were built and sold by the Rand Drill Company.