Church Church Everywhere so Let's All Have a Drink

Even though I was away from my summer church for the weekend, I figured that, as always, it would be beneficial to attend church Sunday morning. Before I left on this trip I checked for an LCMS church in the area, and surprisingly Hibbing had one, Grace Lutheran Church . I attended their early service so that I would have time to partake in the other activities I had planned for that day. Keeping in good LCMS tradition, there were mainly older people at the service and I was the youngest one there, less a couple of small children. The members claimed that more younger people attended the later service though. I just see it as more evidence that LCMS women in their 20's are hidden somewhere. Although it was an LCMS church, they did not use the traditional liturgy. Not that contemporary services are evil in and of themselves, but many times these services break down to "let's be happy," watering down solid theology so that people can just get along. It looked like all this church did was replace the hymns with contemporary songs though, which was not too bad. They also ditched the liturgy in the hymnal in favor of one printed in the bulletin. I really like the liturgy in Lutheran Worship, but it also is not quite the Law to use it. During their liturgy they omitted the Creed and altered confession some. From confession they removed the line "and justly deserve[d] Your temporal and eternal punishment", which is not the most uplifting statement, but none the less, absolutely true.

After the service, some drinks and small snacks were served, and they invited me to stay. While talking with them during this fellowship, I learned that these residents were more or less shocked that I would visit this area to see the mines. I guess the Iron Trail tourism burro did not do a very good job convincing its own residents about the entertainment value of the area. Then again, your hometown is always boring, and you never want to visit it (unless it was to get a home cooked meal from mom). After some snacks though, I departed so that I could make it to all the places I wanted to go.

Tower Train Museum

Chugga Chugga Train Museum

My big activity for the day was visiting Soudan Underground Mine State Park, but on the way there I would pass by Tower Train Museum . This was a small museum located in some restored train cars which used to run between this area and Duluth, MN. They even had the nice big steam locomotive which once pulled the train. The museum had lots of old and small artifacts from the boom time of mining in the area. Their collection included old children's toys, ice skates, and many other things. There were also many photos from this era. I really liked the museum and found it very interesting.

Soudan Underground Mine State Park

After visiting the museum, I went to what I thought would be the neatest stop on my trip, Soudan Underground Mine State Park . The main attraction of this park was a closed mine which guided tours went through. It reminded my of the mine attraction at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which I loved as a kid. Of course, this was the real thing so it would be even better.

Our train ride half a mile below the surface of the earth

The tour started off by descending almost half a mile into the earth using the mine's original elevators. After we descended to the bottom of the mine, we rode the train which was used to haul rock during the mine's operation. My tour guide was a local resident whose family had worked in the mine for several generations. The tour guide also had the worse Minnesota/Canadian accent that I heard during my entire stay in Minnesota that summer. Despite this accent she was actually a very good tour guide. She was very knowledgeable with respect to the mine and its history, and was able to describe everything very well. She was also pretty cute, so it probably would not really have mattered much if she had been a horrible tour guide.

The giant motor which powered the elevators

During the tour they showed us some of the caverns in which iron ore had been excavated and described the process that was used. They also did the normal, "shut off all the lights to show what darkness really is." Now I have been in caves before and had experienced this, but what surprised me was just how dark the working conditions were during the mines operation. While not pitch black, there were no permanent lights in the caverns so the lamps on the miners' helmets were the only source of illumination. It was not much light either. I could only imagine the difficulty in working in such darkness for such a large chunk of the day.

The giant structure which supported the elevator

There was actually a section of the mine that was still in use, but no longer for iron ore. I believe it was the University of Minnesota which had set up a laboratory to try and detect neutrinos. I do not know the exact details, but I believe they were shooting neutrinos between there and a laboratory in Chicago, trying to get them to interact with the dense rock. Scientists do this because neutrinos do not really like to interact with well...anything we know of. Shooting many neutrinos through dense rock increased the chance of getting one to interact. They did this because apparently scientists can learn things if they could get them to hit the atoms of the rocks. I did not have a chance to take a tour of this area though, as I would have had to take a separate tour which happened later that day.

This was where all the iron ore was dumped into waiting train cars

After I returned to the surface from my excellent underground tour, I decided to hike around some of the park's topside trails. I began my hike and quickly discovered that the trails were not maintained very well. Admittedly, I was not on one of the main trails, but it was still pretty bad. It was very over grown and a couple of times I had to double guess myself as if I was actually still on the trail. By some of the markings on the trails though, it appeared that they were mainly used for snowmobiles or skiing in winter. I guess their summer season was not long enough to worry too much about hikers like me.

I was able to stumble across a couple of interesting places during my hike though. One of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes was located by the park. Unfortunately, I could not get a real good look at it because of wall to wall garages along the shore. For several hundred yards there were sheds built used to store boats. They were packed to densely though, that I could hardly see the lake. I had never seen anything like it before, but then again I do not really have any experience boating either. All the sheds must have looked pretty ugly from the lake though.

One of the deep old open pit mines

I also stumbled across some of the open pit mines within the state park's boundaries. When mining originally began in this area, miners just dug big holes in the ground to try and extract the iron ore. After the holes got too deep though, the open pit mines became too dangerous and impractical, so they switched to the underground mines I toured earlier in the day. The original open put mines though, still remained. They of course had fences around the pits to try and keep people from falling into them. Even though I really do not like cliffs, with some careful maneuvering I was able to scoot myself towards the edge of the pit. It was very deep and had quite a steep drop off. It was so over grown with vegetation though, that it would have been impossible to tell that it was once a mine just by looking at it. There did not appear to be any paths into the pit though, so I continued on my way.

The last spot I stumbled across was the second entrance to the mine. There were two entrances to the mine while it was active, but only one was used for giving tours. This other entrance, called the Alaska Entrance, actually looked very similar to the entrance that was still used active for the tours, but I guess that should be expected. It also had large fences and barbed wire around it to try and keep people from hurting themselves in the mine.

After my several mile hike though, I found my way back to my car and had to head out so I could make it my final stop on my trip.

Splitrock Lighthouse

After having an already filled day, I still had another stop on the trip's itinerary. This last stop was at Splitrock Lighthouse State Park , which was located on the shore of Lake Superior. I had a little bit of a drive before I got there though, especially since there were not any interstates that far North. A nice side effect of this travel though, was I got to drive on some really fun roads. Let me start off by saying that I am not one of those Fahrvergnügen people, seeing driving mainly as a chore that needs to be done to get from one place to another. Driving on Highway 1 and 2 from Ely to Silver Bay, however, was a really awesome experience. For about forty miles it was a two lane road winding through a forest. It was remote enough where you did not have to worry about intersections and other cars much, but were also constantly negotiating hills and turns. There were probably about twenty miles in the middle of it in which cars could not pass each other because there was not a straight away long enough. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this drive. I bet it would have been even better if I actually had a car with some power, and not my POS four-banger.

The lighthouse which gives the park part of its name

Even though I had my route planned out pretty well, I misread my map and took about a twenty mile detour in the totally wrong direction. This was particularly annoying because I was already being pressed for the amount of daylight I would have to enjoy Splitrock Lighthouse State Park. Ah well, at least remote roads are good for making up time.

I finally arrived at the state park, but only had a couple of hours before dark. This meant that I would have to rush through to see the park, which would suck, but I did not have much choice. A good thing though, was that my parking sticker from Soudan State Park was valid at any other state park for the same day, so I did not have to pay another admission fee.

The park, however, wanted a separate fee to actually go through the lighthouse, so I decided to just hike around the park some. I started off by hiking along the shore of Lake Superior. This was a lot of fun because the shoreline was pretty rocky. I got to climb around on all the rocks and jump between them, trying not to injure myself or fall into the water. It actually reminded me of a miniature version of the shoreline of Maine, which I had the privilege of also crawling around, but about ten years previous. I continued hiking up the shoreline towards the lighthouse until I could not go any further without swimming. So I turned around and decided to hike inland some.

There was a lookout point marked on top of one of the hills, so I headed along some trails to ascend to the top of that. The trail wrapped around the back of the hill and made its way to the top. The trail was only about a mile long and climbed only a couple of hundred feet so it was not really a difficult hike. When I arrived at the top, I was greeted with a great panoramic view of the shoreline of Lake Superior. I could see quite a way up and down the coastline and could even barely spot Wisconsin, located on the other side of Lake Superior. Also on the top of this hill was a fireplace made out of stones. There was a sign next to it saying that no one was really sure who built this fireplace or why it was there, but many people suspect it was an attempt by one person to woo a woman. It was pretty neat to see this mysterious structure on top of this hill.

View from on top of the lookout

On my way back from this lookout, I also passed through some of the campsites in this state park. These campsites were pretty interesting. They were so-called "remote" campsites, meaning there were no roads leading right up to them. Instead, a cart was provided with each campsite for patrons to haul their supplies from car to campsite. It probably was not more than about a quarter or half mile between the sites and the parking lot though. Being the very inexperienced backpacker and liking all my crazy outdoor adventures, I thought this was a wimpy "remote" campsite. Of course, not all people like doing things the crazy way I do, especially if they have children. Also I probably should not get too prideful in my outdoor adventures, since I probably look pretty wimpy compared to others.

Splitrock Lighthouse State Park was really neat. I know I would have enjoyed this park even more if I had some additional time, plus there are about five other parks along this section of Lake Superior that would also be cool to visit. I guess I will have to make it back up this way sometime. After my abbreviated and hurried exploration of Split Rock Lighthouse, I had to head back to Minneapolis so I could get to work the next day. Nothing interesting happened on my ride back, and I arrived home pretty late, ready to get up nice and early the next day to make money for the ladies.

Conclusion

All in all, this was not the greatest trip I was ever on, but did enjoy a lot of it. The underground mine was really awesome and Split Rock Lighthouse would have been even better if I had a little more time. In any case, it sure beat the heck out of sitting in my room in front of my laptop.