A mile-wide, 1,780-foot-deep toxic lake in a former open-pit copper mine — now an EPA Superfund site open to paying visitors
300 Continental Drive, Butte, MT 59701
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
$3 per person admission to the viewing tunnel and platform. Children under 6 free.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved tunnel leads to covered viewing platform; accessible to wheelchairs
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1955 · Anaconda Copper Mining History · EPA Superfund Site · Environmental Disaster · Snow Geese Die-Off 1995 and 2016 · National Priorities List
Anaconda Copper began open-pit mining at the Berkeley location in 1955, expanding an operation that had run through underground tunnels since the late 19th century. At peak production the pit measured about one mile across and employed hundreds of workers. Mining ceased in 1982 when ARCO, which had acquired Anaconda in 1977, shut down the pumps that kept groundwater out of the underground workings. The pit began filling immediately.
By the mid-1990s the lake had grown to more than 900 feet deep and was recognized as one of the largest bodies of contaminated water in the United States. The water — a saturated solution of sulfuric acid, arsenic, cadmium, zinc, copper, and other heavy metals leaching from exposed ore — turned a distinctive rust-orange and blue-green. The pH hovers near 2.5, comparable to vinegar.
On the night of November 28, 1995, a flock of Snow Geese estimated between 342 and 500 birds landed on the pit during a snowstorm. Nearly all of them died, their esophaguses and stomachs chemically burned. A follow-up event in August 2016 killed approximately 3,000 geese. Atlantic Richfield now employs noise cannons and pyrotechnics to deter birds, a 24-hour bird deterrence program required by the EPA.
The Montana Department of Environmental Quality designated the pit a Superfund site. Ongoing remediation is projected to cost well over $1 billion. A water treatment plant began operating in 2019. Visitors pay $3 at the eastern wall's viewing tunnel for a direct view of the contaminated lake and interpretive panels on its geology and chemistry. Roughly 35,000 people per year make the trip.
Sources
The Berkeley Pit occupies a strange position in dark tourism: it is not haunted in any folkloric sense, yet it disturbs visitors in ways that outlast typical landscape experiences. The acidic water's shifting colors — cobalt, rust, and yellow-green depending on angle and time of day — and the absence of any living thing on its surface create an atmosphere that several writers and dark tourism researchers have described as anti-pastoral: a landscape that looks like terrain but operates like a chemical reactor.
The 1995 Snow Geese event has become the pit's central legend. Witnesses described the birds arriving at night during a blizzard, landing on what must have appeared to them as an ordinary body of water, and dying in numbers across the surface by morning. The image — thousands of geese, the improbable beauty of the pit's colors, the industrial scale of the kill — circulates in environmental journalism and dark tourism literature as a kind of parable.
The pit has been the subject of a full-length book, Don Spritzer's Roadside History of Montana, which covers it, and it features in dark tourism guides as one of the few American sites where paying visitors are invited to contemplate an ongoing environmental disaster from a platform inside the disaster itself. Butte journalist and poet Leah Taplin wrote a widely cited piece describing the pit as 'the most honest thing in town' — a remark that appears in several regional travel features.
No ghost sightings or paranormal claims are associated with the pit. The phenomena visitors report are chemical and geological: the smell of sulfur on still mornings, the silence, the color.
Media Appearances
Walk through a 30-foot tunnel in the pit's eastern wall and emerge onto an elevated covered platform above the contaminated lake. Interpretive panels explain the pit's geology, toxic chemistry, the 1995 Snow Geese die-off event, and the ongoing $1 billion-plus remediation effort.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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