Rising up to 200 feet tall amidst the residential areas surrounding uptown Butte, these black steel headframes that once lower miners thousands of feet beneath the surface now stand as memorials under the night sky to their hard work and sacrifice. Pictured on the left above is the Travona, one of the lowest on the hill, was the first to be lit with the red LED lights in Butte. The Travona was the pioneer of many preservation projects in the historic mining city following her lighting debut in 2003. Within the past decade since the Travona Project, about a dozen of these towers have been preserved or are undergoing preservation in keeping Butte's diverse heritage remembered for generations to come! Pictured next to the Travona is the Anselmo mine headframe, one of the tallest of the remaining headframes, held her lighting ceremony just before Christmas of 2004. The Anselmo is the best preserved mine and headframe in all of Butte. Standing today in the condition that it was in at the time the mine was closed in 1959, the Anselmo mine gives visitors an amazing opportunity to see how this 4,300 foot deep mine operated since its opening in 1887 when lodes of zinc were discoverd beneath her.
Venturing up to the "M", I was able to get a shot spanning the valley below marked with the red beacons with the more modern open pit mines visible behind them beyond the edges of the city near the feet of the Continental Divide mountain ridge. Pictured below is the Mountain Consolidated Mine is the deepest mine of Butte. Nicknamed the Con, she is also known as the "Mile High, Mile Deep" being Butte sits at about 5,540 feet above sea level and the Con reaches down about 5,380 at her deepest point into the metal rich soil of the Hill.
