Agate book Schedule

For those of you waiting for the new agate book, there has been a delay in the books getting through customs. I was supposed to pick them up today, but now it will be next week. I am disappointed but the situation is certainly out of my control. I'll keep everyone informed.

Mines and Bats

While at the Quincy mine, there were interpretive signs about a common resident of the mine. The little brown bat (sometimes called little brown myotis) (Myotis lucifugus) is a species of the genus Myotis (mouse-eared bats), one of the most common bats of North America. As suggested by the bat’s name, its fur is uniformly dark brown and glossy on the back and upper parts with slightly paler, grayish fur underneath. Wing membranes are dark brown on a typical wingspan of 8.7–11 inches. Their ears are small and black with a short, rounded tragus. Adult bats are typically 2.5–4 inches long and weigh 0.2–0.5 ounces. All teeth including molars are relatively sharp, as is typical for an insectivore, and canines are prominent to enable grasping hard-bodied insects in flight.

Little brown bats are insectivores and eat moths, wasps, beetles, gnats, mosquitoes, midges and mayflies, among others. Since many of their preferred meals are insects with an aquatic life stage, such as mosquitoes, they prefer to roost near water. They echolocate to find their prey. Often they will catch larger prey with a wingtip, transfer it to a cup formed by their tail, then eat it - smaller prey are usually just caught in the mouth. They often use the same routes over and over again every night, flying 3-6 yards high above water or among trees. An adult can sometimes fill its stomach in 15 minutes; young have more difficulty. If they do not catch any food, they will enter a torpor similar to hibernation that day, awakening at night to hunt again.

The little brown bat is found all over North America from northern Mexico to interior Alaska. It is the most abundant bat found in the United States and Canada. Although they roost in man-made structures, many can be found in caves and mines. Since little brown bats live in a temperate zone, they must find some way of dealing with winter. Most temperate bats either migrate or hibernate, but little brown bats do both. In summer, the males and females live apart, the females raising young. When fall comes, both sexes fly south to a hibernaculum, where they mate and then hibernate. Those that do not hibernate undergo a prolonged period of hibernation during the winter due to the lack of food. They hibernate in caves or mines as a community. Little brown bats mate in the autumn, before hibernation begins, and over winter the male's sperm is stored inside the female's body, and the infant is conceived in spring. When they arise in the spring, the females go to nursery colonies which may often be the same place where they were born.

These nursery colonies consist mainly of adult females and their young. The nursery colonies sometimes get to numbers as big as 1000 bats in one cave or mine. Some of the U.P. mines have many thousands. Gestation is 50-60 days. They usually have one baby per female each year, but sometimes they have twins. The young are born in an altricial state with their eyes closed and will hang in the nursery while their mothers forage at night. Their eyes open on their second day. They cling to a nipple constantly until they are two weeks old. At 3 weeks, they learn to fly. By 4 weeks, they are adult size.

The number of males in the nursery increases in September, and in October all of the bats migrate back to the caves to hibernate. They use the same hibernaculum and summer colonies year after year. While the females are at the nursing colonies during the summer, males roost in small groups in rock crevices or tree hollows.

Females may be sexually mature in the fall after their birth, but males may take a year longer. About half of females and most males breed in their first autumn. They can live up to 33 years, males living longer on average, though the average lifespan is shorter since about 50% of little brown bats die in their first year.

Kingston Plains and Grand Sable Dunes photos

Southwest of Grand Marais around fifteen miles is the area called the Kingston Plains. This area, part of the Lake Superior State Forest, is also known as the stump field. This ghostly plain was created when forest fires burned so hot that everything including the seeds in the soil's humus was destroyed so the forest couldn't regenerate as it usually would. In the last 80 or 90 years some trees have regenerated but the plains are mostly dotted with tree stumps. Those stumps with straight tops were logged; those with ragged tops were destroyed by the fire. In most cases when there are large forest fires the U.S. Forest Service, or its equivalent back then, replanted. But since the Kingston Plains have no river system, they decided to not re-plant. As a result the ecosystem is isolated and was left on its own.

Pine resins within stumps have preserved pine stump fields as ghost forests, which provide an unusual visual record of the old-growth forests here before settlement. Stumps show the pines' density and size. It's not uncommon to see big stumps, two feet in diameter, every ten feet. In the Kingston Plains today, lichens are the principal living plant. Researchers have discovered that there are species of lichen that are unique to the Kingston Plains and exist no where else.




Since my hiking friend is back from New Mexico, we headed up into the dunes yesterday. Here are a couple of shots of Wendy plus photos of the dune scenery.







While walking across the dunes we saw a lot of the endangered Pitcher’s Thistle (Cirsium pitcheriRange). This plant is a native thistle that grows on the beaches and grassland dunes along the shorelines of Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Huron. It is now found in Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin and in Ontario Canada. Also pictured are the yellow bouquet-like flowers that were blooming everywhere in the dunes.




In the middle of the dunes we ran across this "dune art." Perhaps it is an alter to honor the beauty of the area.



I'll never get tired of taking photos of Au Sable Point.

Quincey Mine -- Post 3

Continuing the blog tour of the Quincy Mine, this posting finishes the steam hoist building and then proceeds to the copper mine. The steam hoist, which was installed in the early 1900s, was the pride and joy of the Quincy Mine. It looks like a grooved bee hive, sitting on its side. Pictured below is a photo of part of the hoist as well as one of the two steam generators. Steam power was used to turn the hoist, which wound and unwound the cable that transported cars into and out of the mine. Two cars were moved in tandem. They either hauled ore cars, worker transport cars, or water cars. The ore cars were hauled at more than 35 mph. When they were moving the workers, they slowed the transport to 15 mph. The miners harvested ore 6 days a week, 24 hours a day. On Sundays, a skeleton crew worked to transport the water cars to remove water from the mine and prevent it from flooding.




Safety was always the first priority. The Qunicy Mine not only had a telephone system to allow the miners to communicate with the hoist operator, but an essential backup system was installed with lights. Since the miners included people from all over the world who spoke many different languages, the telephone system was not always effective. The other system used red lights that could be turned one and off in a series of codes to facilitate communication and make sure that the hoist operator knew when to move and stop the hoist.



After exiting the hoist building, we were escorted to the tram that transported us to the mine's entrance. The tram travelled by rail toward Houghton and down the hill. The view of the bridge across the portage connecting Houghton to Hancock was spectacular.




Then we had a seat on the carriage that was hooked to a tractor. The tractor accessed the mine and travelled mostly horizontally into the mine. We travelled more than 2,000 feet on the seventh level. As already reported, levels 8 through 92 are now flooded.




Instead of timbers to support the mine's ceiling, there are straps. The spikes holding the ceiling straps are driven up to six feet into the bedrock.



From what the tour guide explained, it was more cost effective to mine the rock that contained only two percent copper, as compared to the heavy solid chunks of copper which were difficult if not impossible to remove from the mine. Pictured below is the tour guide with one of the copper chunks.



Until the automatic drills were invented, minors used hand steels and sledge hammers to drill the dynamite holes. Mining became much more efficient when the automatic drills were put into use. In both cases, several holes were drilled so that the dynamite would blow out a section of the ore.





Trammers then loaded the ore onto ore cars.



When we reassembled onto the carriage, you could see the mine's exit from almost a half mile away.

Quincy Mine -- Post 2

Continuing the blog version of the Quincy Mine tour, below are a couple of more photos taken from inside the Shaft #2 building. The first is one of the explosives car. Mining could not have taken place without dynamite. The second photo is a side dumping car that made it easier to transfer the chunks of rock that contained two percent copper.




Once you leave the Shaft #2 building, you walk toward the hoist building. Here is a shot of a building that was next to the shaft #2 building as well as some of the equipment scattered outside.






Finally, you enter the building attached to the hoist building. When the new steam hoist was built, the Quincy Mine staff decided to construct a building that they could be proud of. The building's exterior was made of Jacobsville sandstone. Special window glass was used, the interior was lined with Italian tile, and the original roof was made of Spanish tiles.






In the building attached to the hoist building there are two rooms with numerous interpretive displays and models. Three of the models are pictured below.





Included with the displays are stories about two large chunks of pure copper that were found and recovered from the Great Sand Bay, which is located off the west side of the Keweenaw Peninsula. One chunk was six feet long and the other 19 feet long. The largest is on display.

Quincy MIne--Post 1

When the mines began opening in the 1840s, the companies were desperate to hire experienced workers. Since mining had not taken place yet in this country, they went overseas to recruit workers. The Quincy Mine was the first to recruit miners from Finland.



The Quincy Mine operated for decades with almost no automation. It took an hour or more for miners to climb down ladders by the light of the candles in their pit helmets. The company didn't even supply the candles: the miners had to buy them from the company. Then by candle light, one miner held a hand-steel drill up to three feet in length while one or two other men used sledge hammers to manually drill holes in the hard basalt rock. Once a series of holes were drilled, they inserted sticks of dynamite and took cover. The ore containing around two percent copper was then loaded by hand into cars by the trammers and pushed to the shaft. Mining during the 1800s was truly backbreaking work.



The Quincy Mine never used mules, but other mines in the area did until around 1920.



The main shaft at Quincy was the #2 shaft. Mining operations from this shaft resulted in creating the deepest mine in the country. By 1906 they reached 5,300 feet (60th level). By 1913 they reached 6,400 feet (72nd level). By 1919 they reached 8,000 feet (85th level). By 1932 they reached 9,260 feet (92nd level).

In the early decades, the men only were paid for the ore they brought out: they were not paid by the hour. Thus, if you were a slacker you didn't make it because your fellow workers would not put up with your lack of productivity.

Here are a few shots of Shaft #2.





Tomorrow's blog update will present information about the steam hoist that was the best in the country. The hoist was used to move men and ore up and down and to and from the mine. Here is a model showing how the rope cables were connected by towers between the steam hoist building and the shaft.



This photo was taken inside the Mine Shaft #2 building. It shows Jericho standing in front of two transportation vehicles that were moved by the steam hoist. The stairway contraption on the right was used to transport the men into and out of the mine.