Eagle Butte Mine Overlook

Under the grasslands of the Powder River Basin lie some of the thickest coal seams on earth, more than two hundred feet thick in places, low in sulfur and close enough to the surface that early settlers dug their own fuel from the outcrops. Since the 1970s that coal has been taken out in open pits on a scale hard to picture, loaded onto unit trains and sent to power plants in more than two dozen states. Wyoming mines close to forty percent of the country's coal, nearly all of it from this basin, and seven of the ten largest coal mines in the United States are here, the biggest, North Antelope Rochelle, some sixty-five miles south of Gillette.

Eagle Butte, a few miles north of town, has been mining since the 1970s, with shovels and haul trucks working the Roland and Smith seams, and it is one of the few working mines that takes visitors. An overlook beside the highway looks into the pit, and from late spring through summer the Gillette visitor center books tours of about two hours, often led by miners, that go in among the machines and out to the reclaimed ground where mining has finished.

Gillette calls itself the Energy Capital of the Nation. Wyoming's coal output peaked in 2008 and has fallen since as coal-fired power plants have closed.