The Inco Superstack in Sudbury, Ontario, is 1,250 feet tall (115 feet wide at the base, 52 feet wide at the top), making it the tallest chimney in Canada and the Western Hemisphere, the second-tallest freestanding chimney in the world (after a chimney in Kazakhstan). I see it every summer on my drive west from Quebec to Manitoba, and it is indeed a beast. The Anaconda Smelter Stack is still the tallest brick chimney in the world.

From this angle, it's not hard to believe.

Mind your step.

The smelter and train tracks and hustle and bustle are gone. The impressive smokestack is left as a reference point.

He worked there for a while and also used to own a "meat market" in the city. I used to tell people he owned a disco (you had to be there).

One must be careful when spelling and pronouncing "Butte Hole."

Beside a number of the approach tracks to the smelter you can see covered third rails for electric power, similar to many subway systems. Electric trains using overhead wires hauled ore cars between Butte and the Anaconda smelter from 1916 until the 1960s. This photo from the Montana State Library shows the third rail locomotives used only at the smelter.

Timely posting for me, because I’m currently reading a book titled Anaconda about the whole copper mining business there. Found it in my parents’ house while cleaning it out. My uncle lived there, and we visited the Butte Hole once. I still have some hunks of copper ore and cast copper from then.