Ultima Thule, Pt. 3: “The Bill Nichols Trail & the Quest of King Phillip"

June, 2011.

RETURN to part 2
After my tour of the Adventure Mine came to an end I figured I still had half a day to kill, and a warm-up hike before embarking upon my Isle Royale crucible would be a good idea. I had several points marked out on a map of the vicinity. I was in the village of Greenland near where M-38 and M-26 intersect; Mass City and Rockland form a sort of tri-city area here, but the total population of all three is probably less than 400 people. I was actually not far from the Norwich Mine, which I devoted five days to last year, but I had other fish to fry now. Namely Lake Mine and its siblings. Here is the immediate vicinity of Adventure…you can see the Bill Nichols Trail snaking along from the Adventure Mine at left, to the south and eventually eastward off the map to the right:

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Here is a zoom-out showing the towns of Greenland (upper left), and Mass City (lower left), with the Lake Mine location at upper right:

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And here is a close-up of the Lake Mine’s hill:

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The whole hike out and back to Lake was several miles but it was over easy ground; the Bill Nichols is a wide gravel ORV/snowmobile trail that follows the old rail bed that served these mines when they were in operation. This is why the Copper Country is such a hot spot for ORV’ers--it used to be webbed with endless narrow gauge railroads for shipping ore down from the hills to the mills. The trails are a great way to find ruins.

I donned my short-excursion army pack once again, loaded with my compass, DEET, water, snacks, and a few other odds and ends like my extra flashlights in case I actually did enter a mine. After coming fresh off my full-bore exploration of Adventure Mine, I was feeling pretty fearless. Since I couldn’t carry these maps out in the field with me without lugging my laptop around, I held a piece of paper up to the screen and traced out a hand-drawn map to help me remember. I folded it up in my pocket and hit the trail. The day was warming up a bit but it was still only about 70 degrees. The bugs were pretty aggressive around here and I took a few hits from the ‘skeets. Almost immediately on my right upon leaving the Adventure property line, I saw this beastly shaft collar of the Adventure Mine #5:

It actually has a concrete shaft collar, and was a double-wide shaft, but as you can see it has been capped by the familiar method of welding a skein of old railroad iron over it. Just inside the woods to the left were a series of other typical foundations, one of which was undoubtedly the hoist. Looking down into the shaft:

I continued along the trail to my target. I soon passed a ruined rock foundation to what looked to be a smokestack base…it was near where my marker for South Lake Mine is on the second map posted above:

However everything here on the north side of the trail to my left was marked private property, so when I thought I saw more foundations in the cliffs beyond this I decided not to investigate yet. I continued eastward. There was also this old house right before I crossed M-26:

Once across the highway I soon found the beginning of the Lake Mine’s hill, still covered in its own waste-rock vomited from below:

I climbed the tailings and soon realized that there was quite an opening here, but it was not a shaft or an adit, it was an elongated scar-like fissure that stretched for several yards…was it the top of a stope?

I am fairly sure that’s the case here, especially once I saw this:

You see the wooden log between the two rock faces? I think that’s a stull, or brace placed between the floor and “hanging” wall of a mine to prevent collapse.

This next one is looking down into the stope:

As you can see, the thimbleberries were almost ready to bloom.

A little further down the fissure I found a point that was big enough for me to fit into. I crawled in a little and could see it went a ways:

Me climbing down:

Looking back up toward the opening:

Turns out this went nowhere…it had caved-in to the point of being blocked off. And there were some vicious looking spiders about, so I crawled back out.

The view from the side of this hill wasn’t bad:

If my calculations are correct this particular working would’ve been part of the Lake Mine B, whose #1 shaft had to’ve been nearby, prolly up top. As you can see by the map of the hill there are several different named mines, and a few that had older names (i.e., Belt Mine), which were subsequently bought up by the Lake syndicate. The post office for this town changed its name in 1910 from Belt Mine to Lake Mine, and closed by 1939. Again, like at the Adventure, this hill always showed promise but never paid off, and in 1919 mining ceased.

I came back down the hill and decided I didn’t really feel like climbing a bunch of steep-ass tailings piles today. My plan would instead be to skirt along the bottom edge of the hill here to try and find any adits or ruins, then circle back behind the hill once I found the cleft where the Firesteel River cut through next to it in hopes of finding a gentler slope up. This meant bushwhacking. I felt it’d be a good idea to get some practice in on that since one of the things I wanted to attempt on Isle Royale was going cross-country off the trail to find some of the remoter mines there.

I grabbed my compass out of my pack and began marching through the dense brush, trying to keep the side of the hill in sight as a reference. This proved somewhat difficult and I wished I would stop coming up here in midsummer to try and find shit when the woods are all in full foliage. My last trip in January was an eye-opener, heh.

One thing I came across almost immediately on my left was this shelter someone had erected:

According to my map I should’ve seen signs of the Lake Mine B-shaft #2 by now, or perhaps even the Frezetter Mine. I kept going. Becoming dissatisfied with this, I took out my compass to record my bearing, and the approximate bearing of the side of the slope. I was heading about 60 degrees east, and kept checking periodically to ensure that I was indeed going in a straight line. I had now gone quite a ways and did not see anything. I now wished I had kept track of my paces.

I did come across this, which maybe was something…?

Finally it got to the point where I knew I would get lost too far afield if I kept going. I made the decision to abandon my course and make a 90-degree turn south to intersect the Bill Nichols Trail again, which by looking at the map you can see is supposed to continue just south of me. I knew that I would be better able to keep track of my distance there instead of being lost in a dizzying sea of green leaves, and would make a lot better speed as well, especially when having to backtrack. Once again I used my compass to ensure I was indeed following a course, knowing in the back of my mind that I could not now make a third correction without at least identifying some actual landmark…if I did, it would be almost impossible to backtrack safely.

To understand my concern in this, if you have never been out in a truly huge hinterland where the possibility of becoming lost is very real, look at an aerial view of the western Yoopee…gigantic swaths of it are nothing but featureless oceans of green. Now imagine being inside that endless green, not being able to see outside of it, and having to navigate.

I trudged on for quite some time, over fallen logs and swampy spots, and every so often seeing what I thought was the Bill Nichols Trail up ahead (but wasn’t). I kept checking my compass heading to make sure I was still going precisely south following the shortest line to intersect the trail. Just as I was becoming nervous, I stepped out onto the wide, gravel Bill Nichols. Now I just had to figure out where I was in relationship to the Firesteel River; theres no way I could’ve crossed it yet without noticing, so I went east again. I had to be very close. Turns out I was, and soon found it. So I turned around and began heading back west to where I started next to the highway. I started counting my paces so as to use comparative distances when I plunged back into the woods again to look for the mines. About halfway back, I saw a small mound that I remembered from earlier, and noted where in my paces it was. Counting what was left back to the highway from the mound, I now wrote these distances on my hand-drawn map while sitting in the shade resting.

I checked the time, and it was getting well on in the afternoon. I was hungry as hell, and thirsty. I suddenly didn’t feel like bushwhacking anymore, haha. Clearly I was doing something wrong since I had not seen any obvious ruins here at Lake. I reluctantly made the decision to give up on this for now in the interest of having time to get to Houghton tonight and get some grub. There were still a couple things along the way that I wanted to check out. I hiked back to Adventure and decided this time to investigate more closely the large foundation I had sighted in the distance on the private land behind the ruin of the South Lake earlier.

As I neared, I could tell it was actually a rockhouse foundation.  With some large concrete pillar leaning up against it:

Even more interestingly, directly next to it was both a shaft and an adit (the shaft mouth is buried in the debris immediately past the barbwire):

Both were sealed, but this was an interesting find nonetheless. Continuing back to Adventure, I figured I had covered maybe six miles today if you count all the wandering off-trail. Not a bad little hike. Before getting in my car, I made a swing by the ruin of the Adventure’s powderhouse.

I love powderhouses…such cute little Hansel & Gretel-looking things…straight out of a fairytale.

Passing it, I also noticed that this area used to be some kind of dump…there were all kinds of old bottles and junk, and even several old 1950s cars popping out of the hill at weird angles.

Getting back in my car and leaving the area I snapped one last pic, of the Adventure Mine assayer’s office foundation:

Anyway, I hit the open road again and swung down to the Lake Mine #1 and #2 to see the titanic rockhouse foundations there:

Again the bugs were very ferocious here, because this stuff was basically in a swamp:

I also tried to locate what is marked on my first map at the top of this thread as “Ohio Mine(?).” I didn’t find much there, and again the bugs were so ferocious that I just scrammed.

Heading north on M-26 toward Houghton, I stopped in the village of Winona, where the King Phillip Mine had been. Via Panoramio I had found a picture of a huge stamp mill ruin, and wanted to check it out. I drove through the miniscule town (more like a loose collection of houses than a town), which had a hand-painted sign declaring, “Winona--Pop.: 19.” Except the 19 had obviously been crudely painted-over once to change it from a “15.” Yeehaw! Anyway, I found the old rock piles from the mine but wasn’t sure which unmarked two-track path into the woods was the right one to follow. I didn’t want to end up in someone’s backyard--or driveway--so I kinda just gave up. I had a feeling it was on private land anyway, since one of them was gated and chained.

My next item of curiosity was something that someone on CopperCountryExplorer.com had posted last year, a “mystery adit” in the trees along the road near Donken, wondering what it was. I drove past the described spot and could not see anything through the trees. So I parked on the road and hiked in. I walked around for another half hour without finding anything. Finally after long tromping through thick brush I spied a cleft in the rock above and hiked up to it. Sure enough it looked to be an adit once, but had clearly been backfilled:

Bah, so much for exploring today, let’s get the hell to Houghton and eat something and call it a night. I’ll need all my energy for the island.

CLICK for Part 4.

References:
A Guide to Michigan's Historic Keweenaw Copper District, by Lawrence Molloy, pg. 81-82

Ultima Thule, Pt. 2: “Down, Down, to Goblin Town”

June 2011.

RETURN to part 1

The next morning when I arrived back at the Adventure Mine, I was the only person there. I went into the office and the guy said he could take me himself. Apparently for $55 you can take the extra-special tour, which involves rappelling and climbing. Yes, please.

They geared me up with a harness and everything, and I brought in a real tripod for a change. He led me back outside to where a surplus Swiss Army troop transport waited to drive us up to the entry point. After a very steep, bumpy ride over a boulder-strewn path through the woods, we were dumped off and I found myself staring at another adit:

My guide walked forward and unlocked the heavy iron gate into the mine. The clanking of metal latches and bars behind me ceased and I found myself locked inside the yawning black coldness of the mine. My guide illuminated his head lamp, and we moved forward. On the floor I could see the old wooden ties for the tram rails:

According to my guide, they were still the original timbers from the 1800s. This place of course reminded me of my trip into Colorado's Gilman Mine, but not as wet and mucky. Or as orange. We soon came to a junction room where drifts (horizontal tunnels) extended out to both left and right. There was an old table full of relics sitting off to the side:

The drifts here are struck at an angle because that’s the orientation of the lode, which is why a lot of the tunnels you’ll see are slanted:

Copper veins here occur at about a 45-degree angle so that’s how it’s mined out along the lode. As the copper is found, you mine out of the ceiling up as far as you can go before it compromises the structural integrity of the level above, or you stop finding copper, whichever comes first. My guide talked all about some of the more technical aspects as I sat and light-painted pictures. Or, tried to...

Mining here at the Adventure started in 1850 and always showed promise but never turned an actual profit. This was another site that had been presaged by ancient copper diggings done by aboriginals.

According to Lawrence Molloy, activity peaked in 1857 but almost died in 1880. It changed hands in 1894 and was run more successfully until 1908, but still never made a profit. It was worked again during WWI, but was salvaged for scrap in 1930.

As usual, work here was done by candlelight in the beginning, and the idea was to drill and blast until a solid copper mass was found. Then men came in with hammer and chisel to find the edges of the ingot, and break it into pieces for easy removal. This was inconceivably laborious.

My guide showed me a spot where a large ingot had been uncovered right before work stopped…the exposed part probably weighed 300lbs. It was unclear just how much more of this piece of pure copper lay within the rock, but the overall expense of working this mine had become prohibitive despite estimates that Adventure managed to remove only a mere 20% of the copper available in their mountain.

We ventured deeper into the bowels of the Adventure. After the era of sledge and hand-bit drilling came the pneumatic drills. Here they had a one-man drill set up as if ready for work:

This was unaffectionately called the “Widowmaker” because of the fact that instead of having teams of men operating together, now one man was forced to work alone all day with this noisy, dangerous piece of shit. If something happened, he had no partner to keep an eye on him or to help him out of the mine in case of mishap. I am also told that it was called the Widowmaker because it had no water lubrication for the bit, meaning there was a lot more dust and the onset of "Miner’s Lung" came much sooner.

To the right of the drill you see a stacked stone wall. When the drilling is done for the day, the dynamite comes in, and the blasting is done at the end of shift. The dust clears overnight and the trammers come in to haul out the freshly blasted rock. Sometimes with poor rock they just piled it along the walls of completed drifts if there was space next to the tram rails, so that they don’t have to cart it all the way out of the mine, and that’s what explains the wall you see here. The yellow wire you see on the ground is blasting wire. Here’s a post drill, which is a little safer:

We came to an adit opening in the side of the mountain overlooking the forest below. The lumber you see is going to be used to construct an observation deck of some sort:

In the distance were the stone ruins of the powderhouse, which I would explore later on. My guide used this opportunity to radio back to the office so that a second guide could come and assist with the descent to the next level. Moving back into the mine we came to the entrance to the second level, which was a winze struck on the usual 45 degree angle--this is where we would have to rappel:

A winze is a shaft that is bored downward to connect two or more existing levels of a mine. My guide unlocked the cage over the winze and I clipped my descender and karabiner onto my harness. At this point the other guide arrived and descended the winze first in order to set the line for us (or something…I dunno, I wasn’t really paying attention). I tied on and went down next, surprising myself with how well I remembered how to rappel after all these years since Boy Scouts. Indiana Jones, eat your heart out.

At bottom I waited for my guide to come down inside a large hollowed out room that reminded me more of a cave than a mine. Now that we were all together again I found out that we had not yet reached the second level--we had to clip on to an anchored line along a wall over a dangerous chasm and walk about 50 yards to a certain point where we could climb down again into another hole. We also had to switch to a second anchored line about halfway. This reminded me more of a cave than a mine. Here’s my guide…we had reached the second level:

After the mine changed hands in 1894 and became the Adventure Consolidated Mine, everyone was fired and the better, more experienced miners were allowed back under what was called the “tribute system.” In other words you were no longer paid by the day, you were paid by how much rock you cleared.

It was sort of chaotic; no longer was there an orderly plan set in place for how the mine would be worked, now the men were basically just told to “go in there and bring the copper out.” This is why the Adventure became more productive, but it also resulted in a disorderly mess of tunnels honeycombing in every direction, as you can see in the above photo.

No more trammers either; waste rock was strewn wherever it could be dumped and soon accumulated into quite a mess down there. They also stoped the shit out of the place, which wan't entirely safe. Here is a blurry shot looking up a stope that was opened clear out of the side of the mountain, and was letting daylight in:

As we forged ahead we passed a pit where I could recognize the oily scent that had enticed me the night before when I smelled it wafting out of the adit in the dark--the pump was down there. According to my guide they had just recently pumped out the second level, which is why they were able to conduct tours down here now.

Every level below us was still flooded however, and I want to say that there are 19 total levels under the Adventure…? That may sound like a lot, but the Quincy Mine had 92 levels…. We started to come up and arrived at what is called the “Ice Cave.”

I can’t remember if it was a way into the third level or what the deal was, but there’s a hole with ice in it (yes, in June) which apparently never thaws.

In later days I guess miners used this to store perishable goods before electricity. We now continued on toward the exit, which led up a “raise” to another adit:

I shot one last pic looking back into the adit, and we emerged from the mountain’s darkness:

This is where we popped out:

Recognize it? We walked back to the office and along the way passed the hoist foundation of the #3 shaft:

I was so bummed that I forgot to get a shot of the Swiss troop transport though. Oh well. I sat in my car and ate lunch while perusing my map of the area to see about hiking around to some of the many other nearby mines.

CLICK for Part 3.

References:
A Guide to Michigan's Historic Keweenaw Copper District, by Lawrence Molloy, p. 82
http://www.mindat.org/loc-8384.html