AMIDON - Compared to some states' highest peaks, it's little more than a molehill. But climbers come from all over the world to White Butte.

At 3,506 feet above sea level, White Butte is North Dakota's topographical giant. It draws climbers who call themselves "highpointers," a group with a goal of reaching the tallest points in all 50 states.

Climbing White Butte, which soars only 400 feet from its base, takes about an hour, but it's not without danger. The route to the top of the butte is riddled with rattlesnakes.

A snake bite could be the least of climbers' worries if they trespass on the land, said Angeline Van Daele, who has owned the butte for 45 years.

"They'll get a worse chewing out if they don't pay me," said Van Daele, 67, who charges $20 a carload.

July and August are the busiest time at the butte, where more than 30 carloads of climbers come in a month. Van Daele said she gets at least a few visitors a week, even in the winter months.

She admits she takes a troll-under-the-bridge attitude toward climbers - and for good reason, she said. Visitors have left gates open, allowing cattle on her land to escape.

"It amazes me how people know how to open gates but they don't know how to shut them," she said.

Van Daele and her husband, Joe, 77, monitor the butte through their huge picture window. She passes time by watching television, drinking and chain-smoking, surrounded by ashtrays piled high with cigarette butts.

"I just sit around here, waiting for these dumb people to show up," she said. "There's not much else to do around here."

Amidon, a town of about 16 people in southwest North Dakota, also has the distinction of being in one of the least populated counties in the country. Slope County has about 760 residents.

Van Daele admits she gets a rise out of hassling highpointers. But she also grudgingly admits she likes the company and relishes in showing visitors logbooks of people who have climbed the butte.

She said she's met people from all 50 states and several foreign countries.

"I have a lot of fun with them," she said.

The butte has been in the Van Daele family for years. The father of Angeline's first husband, Lawrence Buzalsky, bought the land more than 60 years ago, she said. Buzalsky was killed in a tractor accident.

Van Daele said she's climbed the butte many times, though not in recent years.

"It's hard for me to get up there anymore," she said.

Joe Van Daele said he's never climbed the butte and has no plans to do so.

"It's just a hill to me," he said. "We get some money off of it. It's better than nothing."

Don Holmes, president of the Highpointers Club, said Angeline Van Daele is well known within the organization, which has about 2,600 climbers.

"She's a character," said Holmes, who lives in Castle Rock, Colo. "She's the tough one, not the rattlesnakes."

He is one of about 110 people who has climbed the highest peak in each state.

Holmes said only seven of the high peaks are privately owned, like Van Daele's.

Twenty-nine states have higher peaks than North Dakota, he said. Alaska's Mount McKinley is the highest, at 20,320 feet. But some are merely bumps on the land, he said.

"Delaware's is at an intersection and Florida's is just a 25-foot walk from a parking lot," Holmes said. "And Iowa's is at the end of cattle trough."

Holmes said some highpointers have heartburn shelling out money to climb White Butte.

"It's one of the more expensive ones," Holmes said. "But people don't get too upset about paying for it because the alternative is that she could cut off access to it."

White Butte wasn't always known as the state's highest summit, said Ed Murphy, the assistant director of the North Dakota Geological Survey.

Black Butte, 5 miles to the west, was widely considered North Dakota's highest peak until the region was surveyed.

"In 1962, a government study was done to settle the dispute between White Butte and Black Butte," Murphy said.

Black Butte measured 3,465 - 41 feet shorter than White Butte.

Murphy has climbed White Butte dozens of times. He said the butte was formed by erosion over the course of tens of millions of years.

The dense "cap" rock at the butte's summit is rare, he said.

"It's very important (geologically)," Murphy said. "It's one of only three places in North Dakota where those 25 milllion-year-old rocks are present."

Berlin Nelson, a highpointer from Fargo, said he has about a dozen high summits to his credit, but has yet to scale White Butte.

"I think about climbing it a lot," Nelson said. "I've driven by it many times, and I get a little anxious to climb it. But I'm going to leave it until one of the last ones."