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Published: September 2nd 2007
Mesabi Range
Mesabi Range. Yummy!Obfuscator writes: We left C’s cabin near Aitkin, and started the drive northward. Calumet seems to be a speed trap. Sneaky pig comes on the road behind you on the highway as you enter town, watches if you slow down adequately. This whole leg of the drive is along the Mesabi Range, where you can look out the window seemingly at any moment and see little red mountains full of delicious looking iron. It’s probably telling that there’s a little town called Taconite along Hwy 169. We stopped in Grand Rapids to look for an interesting sounding Historic Lumber Settlement museum, but we found that it was going to cost a fair amount, and take more time than we figured we had available, so we drove on. They did give us a heads up to check out Soudan though, which is up near Ely. Grand Rapids was also home to Nuch’s Gas, which has the privilege of having the lowest gas prices we were able to find in northern MN, as well as being full service and selling strike anywhere matches. How can you really beat that?
The first major stop was at Hibbing (approx. 47° 26.292N, 092° 56.385W), which
Take Photos Here
Take Photos Here. It works, actually. is home to the largest open pit mine in the world, or at least they claim it. It’s also home to the Greyhound Busline. (Onaxthiel notes: It’s also interesting that Hibbing isn’t in the same place as it started. After they started mining, they found that they had built the town on part of the ore deposit, so they moved a huge part of the town, which consequently gave rise to the need for bussing to take the workers to the mine and to the other part of Hibbing, and that’s how Greyhound started.) The Hull Rust Mine is enormous. Vast canyons that are really beautiful more or less surround you. There’s water in the bottom of many of them, as well as old and new mining equipment. They liken it to a man-made Grand Canyon, which is probably pretty fair in a lot of respects. They also have on display some of the equipment they use, including the gargantuan dump trucks, and some of the shovel scoops and so forth. The tires to those trucks are 10 feet tall, and the trucks have 800 gallon gas tanks. I think those figures really speak for themselves.
After Hibbing, we
View from Take Photos Here
View from Take Photos Here pretty much drove straight through to our campground. At Chisholm you can see a very large miner statue, and a helicopter-jet fighter aerial battle frozen in time. We found a hiking campsite at Bear Head Lake State Park, about 20 minutes west of Ely. The site itself was about 1.5 miles in from where we parked (approx. 47° 47.599N, 092° 03.408W), and was on a little lake called Blueberry Lake. We hiked in, dropped our stuff, and then hiked the rest of the way around the lake. On that little expedition, we found a hell of a lot of evidence of beavers. Namely, we found lots of trees that had been either partially or fully gnawed through. The most interesting were a couple of very large trees that were still perfectly straight but had been chewed mostly through. We also got to see some strange pinecones, that looked like they could have been alien embryos. I’m more than a little curious if anyone is able to provide an explanation for that particular find. Post hike, we had a little siesta, dinner with a camp stove (no fires were permitted in northern MN parks), and after a while of enjoying a
10 foot tires
10 foot tires very clear night sky, bed.
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