Missoula, MT
In the Bitterroot Valley at 3,206ft MSL, surrounded by mountains on all sides. Class C, two runways (12/30 at 9,501ft, 11/29 at 4,610ft). The University of Montana is in town; the field is also a major US Forest Service aerial firefighting base — the smokejumper training center has been here since 1939, and the field serves as a tanker base for the western US fire effort every summer. Air tanker traffic peaks August-September and can dominate the pattern. The Northern Rockies Coordination Center, which manages firefighting resources across MT, ID, ND, SD, WY, and northern UT, is headquartered on the field.
On the west side of KMSO sits the largest active smokejumper base in the United States — the Missoula Aerial Fire Depot, established 1954. Smokejumping itself began in 1939-40 when the U.S. Forest Service ran the Aerial Fire Control Experimental Project; on July 12, 1940, Earl Cooley made the first operational smokejumper jump over the Nez Perce National Forest. The Missoula base trains every Forest Service smokejumper recruit in the country, dispatches DC-3s, Twin Otters, and Sherpa C-23s to wildfires across the West, and maintains the only public-access smokejumper visitor center on Earth. The 1949 Mann Gulch fire — in which 13 of 16 jumpers died in twelve minutes, the subject of Norman Maclean's "Young Men and Fire" — was run from this base. The Memorial Wall lists every smokejumper killed in the line of duty.
On the uphill edge of Butte sits a hole that filled itself with poison. The Berkeley Pit was an open-pit copper mine from 1955 to 1982; a mile long, half a mile wide, around 1,800 feet deep. When the pumps were shut off, groundwater rose and turned it into a lake of acid laced with arsenic, cadmium, and dissolved metal; some of the most contaminated water in the country and one of the most expensive Superfund sites going. From the air the color gives it away: rust-red near the surface fading to a sick lime green where the copper concentrates. It has killed migrating geese by the thousands when flocks set down on it. Butte called itself the Richest Hill on Earth for the copper that built the place; the pit is what the bottom of that wealth looks like.
A million acres of glaciated peaks on the Montana-Canada border, often called the "Crown of the Continent" because waters draining from the park reach the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. Going-to-the-Sun Road, completed in 1932-1933 as an engineering masterpiece, crosses the park east-west over Logan Pass at 6,646 feet. The road has been a National Historic Landmark since 1985. The park's eponymous glaciers are vanishing — there were 150 in 1850; 25 remain today, all expected to be gone by mid-century. Grizzlies, wolves, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, wolverines, and lynx all persist in the park. Adjacent Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta forms the world's first International Peace Park (designated 1932).
A 25-mile-long glacial lake in the Idaho panhandle, surrounded by forested mountains. The water is so clear that the bottom is visible from altitude in the shallow bays. The lake's deep blue color against the dark green forest is one of the most striking aerial views in the Pacific Northwest. The floating golf green at the Coeur d'Alene Resort (the only one in the world) is visible from the air. Tubbs Hill, a forested peninsula, juts into the lake near downtown.