Our Lady of the Rockies, Montana

Our Lady of the Rockies is directly on top of the Continental Divide, and looms above the town and mining pits of Butte. It was the vision of a local resident, Bob O’Bill, and was designed by Laurien Eugene Riehl, a local mining engineer. The sculpture was fabricated off site, and airlifted in five sections, which were stacked on top of one another over a few relatively wind-free days in late December 1985, by a military team using a Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter. Our Lady of the Rockies, at 90 feet tall, is likely the fourth largest Virgin Mary in the world, following a 153-foot one in Venezuela, a 148-foot one in Bolivia, and a 108-foot one in France—all of which may soon be overshadowed by a 315-foot tall statue of the virgin under construction in the Philippines. A door in the back leads inside the sculpture, but visitors are not allowed to climb up too far inside, and there is no viewing area at the top (as there is at the comparably scaled Statue of Liberty, which is 111 feet from foot to crown). The view from the top looks westward, over the city of Butte, and the Berkeley Pit, where mining stopped in 1982, and the pit began filling up with acidic water.

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