The Butte park is located East of the old historic district in a pretty run down area just on the edge of the Berkeley Pit (massive super fund site read more here). In fact the "Visitors Center" is pretty much right across the street. The land around the park is pretty much vacant except for some old mining leftovers. Guess I wouldn't want to live that close to the pit either. The park seems pretty fun with a little more streety stuff than usual and two bowls. One large one and one Kidney pool bowl. The drain in the large bowl wasn't working properly so it was filled with an eery green water, some trash and what looked like a dead rat. So we pretty much skated the kidney bowl and the street stuff. The street section had a step up, some various hips, rails and ledges as well as this big whale back bank wall thing that could be pretty fun.
From there we got some lunch in the old Historic District, which is really cool, and then decided we might as well hit Anaconda because it was right on they way.
Anaconda is another town that thrived on mining and then really died out once that ended. Right as you roll into town there is a big Smelter and a massive pile of black tailings. As we got into Anaconda it wasn't snowing anymore but it was blowing about 35 miles an hour and couldn't have been more than 38 degrees. That is what we get for doing a skate trip in Montana in mid October I suppose. The park in Anaconda is another Dreamland park built in 2005 I believe. It consists of one large bowl with a buch of small hip stuff in the shallow end and a street section that is basically two 3 foot quarter pipes with extensions and a table top in the middle. For being so cold we got a pretty good little session after warming up and then headed off to Missoula.
We arrived in Missoula at about 5:00 and it was sunny and relatively warm. We went straight over to the brand spankin new MOBASH skatepark and immediately got back in the groove. We had been skating all day at these parks in Arctic Tundra-like conditions with not a soul in sight. Now we were at Missoula skating in the sun with probably 75 people skating around the park. The Missoula park was definitely my favorite of the bunch. It was finished beautifully. It had a big bowl section with bank walls a cradle and deep area with pool coping. Then it had a kidney bowl behind that then a great looking street section that had some good flow between ledges and rails. The ledges looked to be finished in granite and there were fun bank walls all along the street section. And it's Lit at night! Great park. I was too lazy to bring a camera along to that one so you'll just have to trust me or go over to www.missoulaskatepark.org or do something like Search Flickr and check out some pictures there.
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