The biggest smelter on earth, and a century of what it left behind
At Kellogg, in the Coeur d’Alene Basin, stood what was the largest smelting facility in the world when it was built. The Silver Valley around it spent a century as a centre of silver and metal mining and processing, and the cost of that is not a footnote: it contaminated the water, the land and the air of the basin on a scale that took decades of cleanup work. The mining history here is genuinely great and the poisoning is part of the same story.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours of here.
