Every episode features a theme and incidental music composed and performed by Dublin Gulch.
If you don’t know Butte Montana, you might have heard it’s one of the biggest toxic messes in the country. But now the “Mining City” is on the verge of sealing a deal that could clean it up once and for all. So how did we get here? What comes after Superfund? And who gets to decide? Find out on Richest Hill, a single-season podcast from Montana Public Radio.
"It’s no small feat to tell an enjoyable story about a Superfund site, but, so far, Richest Hill pulls it off. Saks weaves the story of Butte’s past and future into well-paced scenes—it’s not all cadmium, lead, and arsenic—and makes use of a range of unexpected sounds. There’s a snippet of tape from a portentous but entertaining promotional video for a local distillery, in which a man rhapsodizes about Butte’s coppery past and invokes Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell; a “Daily Show” clip about a pit-tourism scheme; labor-union members singing “Solidarity Forever” at the grave site of a long-dead union leader; the firing up of a long-dormant hoisting engine by a ninety-three-year-old former hoisting engineer; and quite a bit of pleasant fiddling. The interviewees’ quotes are varied, well edited, and well chosen. An impassioned local man says, intensely, “If it was not for Butte and Anaconda”—the company in charge of the Berkeley Pit—“you and I might be doing this interview right now in Japanese or German.”
From the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/podcast-dept/richest-hill-a-must-listen-podcast-about-butte-montana