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Getaway Trip to Ely, Minnesota
Ely, MN
July 18-20, 2007

Our cool little cabin at Silver Rapids Lodge, situated between White Iron and Farm Lake.
Looking from our cabin towards White Iron Lake.
Our cabin from The Narrows. That was the name of our cabin, by some strange coincidence...
The docks at our lodge
Looking north on Farm Lake
This is Shadow, one of the wolves at the International Wolf Center. See info about him
This wolf is named Maya. She was sleeping on a rock and I couldn't get a photo of her face.
This is Grizzer, a brother of Maya.
This and the following are dead and stuffed exhibits inside the Center.
Lilly pads on Fenske Lake on the Echo Trail, north of Ely.
Fenske Lake
Tracy standing 1.5 miles down the BWCA Canoe Access trail to the Stuart River entry point. We thought it was going to be just a few hundred feet to the river!
Why anyone would carry a canoe and their gear 1.5 miles down an up-and-down trail just to START their paddling trip mystified us. We were expecting something spectacular, and it was just a swampy little river with lots of flies. Still a fun hike, though.
One of three resident chipmunks that we lured close with pieces of bread.
My Canon 70-200mm F/2.8 lens made it seem closer than it appears, but it had no fear of us.
Now THAT's a close-up chipmunk portrait!
Me having a glass of wine next to Tracy's fire (she poorly built it) at 10:00pm. Tracy was already asleep.
Star trails outside our cabin. 13-minute exposure
Star trails over Farm Lake: 25 minute exposure
Half a mile underground at the Soudan Mine, featuring our tour Guide, Pete.
On the rail train to get to the last 1962 iron extraction room.
I could only bring one lens, and I didn't want to use a flash, so I cranked my camera's ISO to 1600 and shot at 1/20th of a second. Very little light!
Mannequins showing what the drilling and blasting operations looked like.
The timbers protect us tourists from falling down the chute hole that workers dumped their iron ore. The miners had to remember where these severely deep holes were, and there were about 10 in this one cavernous room.
A 1900-era drilling rig, looking suspiciously like a WWII German MG-42 machine gun. Our tour guide, Pete, said the noise of the drills was the biggest occupational hazard for the miners. They all lost their hearing in about 6 months.
We missed the MINOS laboratory tour, but this is one of the entrances to it. They are doing high-level particle physics experiments down here, monitoring muons and quarks fired underground from Fermi Labs in Illinois.
Mineview in the Sky in Virginia, Minnesota. The water is 200 feet from here, and the bottom under the water is 450 feet down.
That is one big dumptruck! Even with a flat tire!
It hauls 240 tons of ore.

By the way, on the way out of the tour at Soudan Mine coming out of the mining chamber, I hollered to our Tour Guide, Pete, and asked him why the surface we were walking on was rippled and divoted so peculiarly.

He explained that because so many people leave the mine and take a piece of iron ore rock with them, the surface I was asking about was pure compacted fine clay.

I had already pocketed the iron rock (left) and would have felt silly dropping it there, so I didn't.

 
 
Copyright © 2007 Tony Rogers