A week in Copper Country, U.P. Michigan
Aug 14, 2014 9:52:28 GMT -5
gingerkid, snowmom, and 1 more like this
Post by DirtCleaner on Aug 14, 2014 9:52:28 GMT -5
For our anniversary I took my wife to the U.P. for 4 days of metal detecting and digging through waste rock piles in at least 6 different old mine dumps.
About 4-1/2 hours of beautiful back highway driving you end up in Houghton, MI. On the way are several little mining towns in various states of activity. While not quite ghost towns they have lost the hustle and bustle of the early mining days.
The first stop was at the E.A. Seaman Mineral Museum. Check them out on-line.
The displays are wonderful, my little cheapy camera doesn't start to show the beauty of this piece.
Or this one:
Historically this area was heavily inhabited by the Copper Culture Indians, of which, very little is known except for the tools they made out of the native copper.
All of the mine dumps we visited the next 4 days look relatively similar. Some are mounded quite high, some long, some with deep pits. But overall the rock appears the same.
So, what can be found here? Depends which mine dump you visit. The earliest commercial mines were started in the 1840's so there are mining artifacts to look for: Chisels, drills, chisel chips, square nails, small gauge railroad spikes. While for specimens there is copper in various forms, epidote, datolite, calchocite, malachite, small quartz crystals, and more, depending where you go.
This pic below is epidote crystals.
Here is a drilled rock with lots of copper in it.
There was some fun billy-goating. (darn photos won't straighten out.)
Below is a great specimen of copper that should clean up nicely. This was from the Central Exploration mine.
Datolite from the Wolverine Mine. (Sadly, when I asked a learned person if what I found was truly dateline, he replied by taking out his pick and whacking it. It will still polish up nicely but I was hoping to cut it in half and display it differently.)
At the Central Mine we found 3 different chisel chips. What they are are chiseled remnants of great sized mass copper, sometimes several hundred tons in size. These were far too big to do anything with, they could not be dynamited apart and no saw was yet made to cut these on site. So, workers were employed with a 6 or 8 pound hammer and a variety of chisels and they methodically cut the masses into manageable sized pieces. Some pieces took an entire crew a year to chisel apart.
The chips were apparently not worth the bother to pick up. Each ridge on these were made by a single hammer blow. And you thought your job sucked!
This is a small chisel which was used to knock out loose pieces in the underground mines. Several would be tapped in to drop the dangerous hangers.
This shows about 75% of what I brought home.
There was a small cost to join the group and each mine had a fee attached to pay for an operator to come in with an excavator to expose some material from deeper in the piles. These dumps are all privately owned and permission is required to go in them. However, the local people and some travelers make it a cottage industry going in them and bringing out pieces. Some of the dumps are being used to make gravel while others may be reclaimed and put back in a close to pre-mining state.
About 4-1/2 hours of beautiful back highway driving you end up in Houghton, MI. On the way are several little mining towns in various states of activity. While not quite ghost towns they have lost the hustle and bustle of the early mining days.
The first stop was at the E.A. Seaman Mineral Museum. Check them out on-line.
The displays are wonderful, my little cheapy camera doesn't start to show the beauty of this piece.
Or this one:
Historically this area was heavily inhabited by the Copper Culture Indians, of which, very little is known except for the tools they made out of the native copper.
All of the mine dumps we visited the next 4 days look relatively similar. Some are mounded quite high, some long, some with deep pits. But overall the rock appears the same.
So, what can be found here? Depends which mine dump you visit. The earliest commercial mines were started in the 1840's so there are mining artifacts to look for: Chisels, drills, chisel chips, square nails, small gauge railroad spikes. While for specimens there is copper in various forms, epidote, datolite, calchocite, malachite, small quartz crystals, and more, depending where you go.
This pic below is epidote crystals.
Here is a drilled rock with lots of copper in it.
There was some fun billy-goating. (darn photos won't straighten out.)
Below is a great specimen of copper that should clean up nicely. This was from the Central Exploration mine.
Datolite from the Wolverine Mine. (Sadly, when I asked a learned person if what I found was truly dateline, he replied by taking out his pick and whacking it. It will still polish up nicely but I was hoping to cut it in half and display it differently.)
At the Central Mine we found 3 different chisel chips. What they are are chiseled remnants of great sized mass copper, sometimes several hundred tons in size. These were far too big to do anything with, they could not be dynamited apart and no saw was yet made to cut these on site. So, workers were employed with a 6 or 8 pound hammer and a variety of chisels and they methodically cut the masses into manageable sized pieces. Some pieces took an entire crew a year to chisel apart.
The chips were apparently not worth the bother to pick up. Each ridge on these were made by a single hammer blow. And you thought your job sucked!
This is a small chisel which was used to knock out loose pieces in the underground mines. Several would be tapped in to drop the dangerous hangers.
This shows about 75% of what I brought home.
There was a small cost to join the group and each mine had a fee attached to pay for an operator to come in with an excavator to expose some material from deeper in the piles. These dumps are all privately owned and permission is required to go in them. However, the local people and some travelers make it a cottage industry going in them and bringing out pieces. Some of the dumps are being used to make gravel while others may be reclaimed and put back in a close to pre-mining state.