Skywatch Friday: Big Sky Pot of Gold

Though a diverse little city of immigrants, Butte Montana was always dominated by a mythic sense of Irish culture. Blame it on the wee Leprechaun that stowed away in the pocket of Marcus Daly, made him a rich Copper King, and went about hiding pots of gold throughout the hills of southwest Montana. I live in Walkerville, the old town on the hill above Butte. Walkerville's original name was "Rainbow"-- very appropriate, given this recent view from my front porch:

Rainbows, like the one above, are best when they come at sunset as the low sun creates a high rainbow arc. Butte/Walkerville is well situated for rainbows: storms move up the low Clark Fork River valley from the west, pass over the town, and then dump a rainshower as they move eastward surmounting the cool air of the Continental Divide that borders our city. The clear, dry mountain air makes for discrete summer storm cells that, once over us, allow the sun to slip in under from the clear skies to the west. If the western sky isn't clear, then even if we don't get a rainbow we'll have a pretty sunset:

Two storm cells moved over the town before the one producing the high, bright rainbow pictured above. The first was a typical, faint, low-angle, mid-day rainbow. The second (late-afternoon) made a nice higher-angle rainbow--actually a bunch of them. Obviously a double, but also with a faint additional "reversed" rainbow below each of the main two:

If you look closely at this pic stitched to form a full panorama, you'll notice a small white dot on the right near where the rainbow touches the East Ridge:

Zoom in with binoculars, and you see the 90-foot tall statue, "Our Lady of the Rockies," officially "the Blessed Virgin Mary, a tribute to mothers everywhere." AKA the Earth Mother Goddess. Seems the Leprechaun planted a pot of gold under her skirts. Good place to begin looking, I should think:

With Montana's warm summer sun and low humidity, "whatever comes down must go up." Sure enough, early next day, the morning sun raised a fog from the previous day's well-watered Earth (that's an old mining headrame -- aka "gallows frame" at the lower right):

Butte America: there might not be much material wealth left here, but the beauty of the place is certainly pure gold.