Butte Airport
ClosedClosed No longer racing, but some of the track is still there.
- A Model T raced a horse as the July 30, 1961 feature
- Hosted the Rocky Mountain Regional Championships on August 27, 1961
- Raced
- 1957-62
- State
- Montana
- What's left
- A good length of the old track surface is still there, in poor to good condition.
- Raced on
- An airport runway
- First race
- September 29, 1957
- Surface
- Runway
- Location
- Butte airport, reached by the dog track road
- People
- Silver Bow Timing Association, sponsor (1957-1962)
- Sanction
- NHRA
- Elevation
- 5,505 ft (1,678 m)
- Coordinates
- 45.95683, -112.49540
The Silver Bow Timing Association sponsored an NHRA-sanctioned drag race at the Butte airport on September 29, 1957, with spectators told to take the dog track road. A benefit race for Bob Rae ran July 20, 1958, at 50 cents a head, and the June 21, 1959 race was NHRA-sanctioned. From 1959, races were usually on the third Sunday. The feature on July 30, 1961 was a car-versus-horse race: ‘Lucky Lager Girl,’ a 49-year-old Model T Ford, against ‘Gallopin’ Girl,’ Whitey Baxter’s 10-year-old horse. The Rocky Mountain Regional Championships followed August 27, 1961. Once the new air terminal went up, the association lost use of the airport for 1963 and moved to land in the Brown’s Gulch area, two miles east of Anaconda.
Background
The airport opened in 1926 as Butte Municipal Airport, the name it carried when racing started. It became Silver Bow County Airport in 1960 and took the Bert Mooney name in 1972, after a Butte pilot who flew the first mail into Yellowstone in 1935.
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