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ISHPEMING
POINTS
OF
INTEREST
Downtown Ishpeming. Unusual historic buildings house a large antiques store, a longstanding outdoors store, a classic Italian grocery, a specialty homebuilders' store with an upstairs gallery of art and home accessories, and a vintage Carnegie library ...
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Cliffs Shaft Mining Museum. See where miners dressed, walked through tunnel to cages to be lowered down in mine. Retired miners tell tales of work life, cave-ins, tragic accidents. Engaging mine model, artifacts, mineral specimens from Ishpeming Rock & Mineral Club. ...
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Lake Bancroft Park. In dramatic surroundings, you can picnic while enjoying good views of Ishpeming and its monumental mining headframes ...
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Jasper Knob, Cliffs Cottage and vicinity. Climb a huge outcrop of deep-red Michigan jasper (“the world's largest gemstone”) and get a nice view of Ishpeming's southeast side ...
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U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame & Museum. In a ski jump-shaped building, the story is told of how U.S. skiing developed from a minor sport brought by Scandinavians, enhanced by Hollywood, Sun Valley, and the illustrious WWII ski assault team ...
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Artisans Gallery & Clay Studio. A working pottery studio and quality crafts gallery showing U. P. pottery, painting, weaving, wood, and glass works. ...
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Da Yoopers Tourist Trap & Museum. The roadside attraction from a popular satirical U.P. comedy group combines free outdoor exhibits like the world's largest chain saw and deer playing cards at deer camp with Yooper novelties, books, and a good rock shop ...
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Al Quaal Recreation Area. This woodsy 300-acre city park offers a 1,200-foot iced toboggan run and swimming on Teal Lake ...
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Tilden Mine Tour. Tour the vast open-pit iron mine and taconite processing plant and see industry on an awesome scale ...
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Tilden Mine Tour
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The U.P. iron industry today excavates iron ore in huge, 300-ton blasts. Now that the veins of richer ore have been mined out, Lake Superior iron mining remains competitive only because of a process that excavates greatly diluted ore and concentrates it into pellets of 64% iron with clay binding. These small round taconite pellets can then be shipped economically from the Michigan ports of Marquette and Escanaba to steelmakers around the Great Lakes. The Tilden mine began pellet production in 1973; it can produce 7.8 million tons a year.
Tours take tourgoers from Marquette and Ishpeming to the mine, where the tour lasts three hours. There's only one tour a day, so space is limited to the number the bus can hold.
Tour guides have been summer employees at Cleveland Cliffs Iron who have parents working at the firm. They have grown up around mining and is in all probability quite well informed and able to handle many questions. The tour, designed by CCI public relations person Dale Hemmila, gives outsiders a good overview of the precarious economics of U.S. iron mining today. Domestic iron mining and steelmaking have been hurt by dumping practiced by countries like Korea which have put a high priority on developing their own heavy industry. "Our biggest concern is the importing of unfairly traded semi-finished steel slabs," says Hemmila. "They use no domestic ore. We contend that much of [these imports] are being done so in violation of U.S. trade laws."
CCI has owned these iron ore reserves since 1865. Today CCI has partnered with two Canadian steel companies, Algoma and Stelco, who wish to control costs of their basic material. CCI manages the Tilden mine for the partnership.
Oddly, the huge open pit is less dramatic than the plant interior. The pit activity is far away. Blasts occur three times a week, in the morning, never at tour time. It's immediately apparent how enormously capital-intensive this operation is. Truck tires are 12 feet high, and they cost in the neighborhood of $20,000 each, tourgoers are told; a shovel would cost $9 million to replace. Mine operations never stop. The Tilden Mine employs around 815 skilled workers, from metallurgists, engineers, and computer operators to heavy equipment operators. Today the hematite pit is around 500 to 550 feet below the viewing area. There's enough ore to go down 800 feet more.
Inside the taconite processing plant, the noise from crushers and huge rotating mills makes it hard to hear. Signs explain steps in processing. A clearly written free souvenir booklet with color photos lets tourgoers review everything: business rationale, operations, environmental impact. The plant experience involves almost all your senses. It is quite warm - briefly - by the kilns. Occasionally the angled geometry of the chutes and towers strikingly frame outside views of the massive piles of rugged red waste rock and the precisely angled piles of pellets. Even in this monumentally unnatural environment, weeds and pine trees are taking hold, attesting to the power of living things.
The tour ends in the quiet control room, where experienced employees invite visitors' questions. Tourgoers leave with a free plastic goody bag including souvenir taconite pellets. It bears the mining motto, "If it can't be grown, it has to be mined."
Incidentally, the Tilden Mine is named after Samuel J. Tilden, best known as the 1876 Democratic presidential candidate who gained national recognition as a reformer fighting New York's Tweed Ring but lost the election despite winning the popular vote. A New York corporation and railroad lawyer, Tilden (described as cold, secretive, and smart) grew rich from investments. He organized the Cliffs Iron Company in 1864. Much later he extended his Chicago and North Western Railroad from Escanaba to the Menominee Iron Range, increasing Escanaba's importance as a "Iron Port of the World."
One 3-hour tour per day mid-June thru late August, Tues-Sat, with busses leaving the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame & Museum (in Ishpeming) at noon, at 12:30. Tours are limited to 30 persons so call in advance for reservations (906-226-6591). Restricted to adults and children age 10 and up. No open-toed shoes (sandals, flip-flops) allowed. Cost per person: $9 . Handicap accessible: no.
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