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Published: September 2nd 2007
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Chittery
Chittery bugger! Obfuscator writes: We woke up fairly early, and having little that needed doing, packed up our stuff and hiked out of our site. We left all our gear in the car, and did some more hiking in the park, this time along one shore (Northeastern) of Bear Head Lake itself. Bear Head Lake was quite a bit bigger than our little Blueberry Lake, and had a bunch of pretty islands. There were some great views all around the part we hiked on, and we were able to find a pretty spiffy peninsula to go out on. I found a nice tree to climb there too, which was a plus. On one of the paths, we also found a very lively and chittery squirrel, which Onaxthiel rustled up for me to take pictures of.
Having heard about Soudan though, we decided that we didn’t want to lose too much time at the Park, and we hit the road. Soudan was about 10 minutes west of the Park, and the signage says that it has the oldest and deepest mine in Minnesota. It’s at the top of a very high hill, or very low mountain. It opened in the 1880’s as an
Bear Head Lake
Bear Head Lake open pit mine, but was highly dangerous, and by the 1890’s, they had switched to underground mining. We wandered around the grounds and looked at a lot of the machinery, particularly “the Crusher,” which sounded pretty cool. The video they had for the Crusher was hilarious, and we got the feeling that the director just asked the people he was filming to use the word “crusher” as many times as they could. The crusher itself is slick, being a set of steel smashing jaws that broke iron ore rocks up into convenient 7” bite-sized chunks.
The real fun started when we took the tour of the mine itself. Not that you have any control over it, but get Paul as your tour guide, since he rocks. The guy’s entire family is made up of miners. He really knows his mining and is quite passionate about the subject. The tour starts with an amusing video that calls Soudan the “Cadillac of Mining,” because the mine was so stable. They didn’t really need to use the support timber of many mines, and never had cave-ins. From there it got much more interesting, as we got in a small metal car and
Bear Head Lake Trail
Trail at Bear Head Lake descended ½ mile down into the mine. It was about 75 outside, but the moment you got in the car, you could tell how cold it was in the mine, since the car was still chilled to about 50 degrees. From there we got on a little train and took a ride that was about ¾ of a mile over to the actual site they show people. The tour, incidentally, takes place on level 27, the lowest the mine ever went. From there we climbed up some stairs and went into an actual “stope,” which I guess in miner lingo is the term for the cave that you work in that’s above the tunnels you use to move stuff. Paul showed us some very cool things, including tools, and turned out all the lights for a time, and then showed us how dark it would have been for the miners years ago. I think the demonstration had the desired effect.
After the mine tour, we went back up, and booked ourselves for another tour that we had heard about. This tour was of the MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search?) lab. I guess the story goes that a few
Penninsula
Penninsula years back, some scientician took the mine tour and decided that this would be a great place to study stuff like neutrinos, because it was so well shielded from normal surface cosmic rays. So many grants later, and after a lot of lowering incredibly large equipment down a very small mineshaft in parts, Soudan mine now hosts MINOS and CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search?). Basically, the Fermilab shoots neutrinos out of its crazy particle accelerator, and they travel something like 450 miles northwest until they slam into a series of 496 enormous steel plates that are the detector they’ve installed ½ mile under the earth’s surface in the mine. Then they look at that data and try to, you know, do sciency things with that. The CDMS project, in the meantime, cools a bunch of itty bitty detectors down to as near absolute zero as they can, so that they can try to discover Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). In short, Onaxthiel and I stood there like Neanderthals in a supermarket. (Onaxthiel adds: Mad science. Mad BEARDED science!) The detector in the MINOS lab though…..very cool.
After we left Soudan, we drove into Ely, which is basically the last
Log with socks at the end
Log with socks at the end vestige of civilization before you hit the Boundary Waters. Ely wasn’t much to look at, but we found a neat looking building with a turret, and grabbed some Subway for dinner, before heading back to Bear Head Lake for the night. We hiked our gear back in, took a little bath in Blueberry lake, and had our camp set up before you could say . . . Ummm . . . Some kinda long word. For my troubles in bathing, I managed to pick up 3 leeches on my feet, which was slick. One of them really didn’t want to let go. The night was a bit stormy, but it only really rained on us a little bit twice, and our Bivy’s held up quite admirably. (Onaxthiel’s lesson learned: Bivy’s work really well. When you’re expecting rain, everything gets waterproofed. A couple of minutes bagging and covering the geat up with a poncho saves a heck of a lot of drying time.)
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allen
non-member comment
SALT
salt for leeches! THEY HATE IT, they DIE!