They give two tours at the park, both lasting for about an hour and a half. One is the historic mine tour and the other is a fossil hunt looking for Cretaceous-aged fossils. Anything you find, you can keep. Of the handful of confirmed dinosaur fossils found in Minnesota, most have come from Hill Annex.
The historic mine tour loads you onto a bus to drive you through the old mine. Inside everything is a dusty red, from previous visitors and when given the option to sit, of course Lukie and Lex chose the back...
At one stop, the tour guide (an older worker while the mine was active) discussed the geology of what they were mining. After he was done (and everyone went to look at the sites), I had to correct some of the big mistakes that he said for Lukie and Lex...
Theres some of the old equipment that you can climb on and look around...
The picture below was taken after our 'corrected geology of the area' talk...
I also had to fix another item the guide said. He was talking about the overburden (the stuff deposited on top of the iron formation) and said their was convincing evidence 'two world-views' that would explain the overburden. First, "geologists explain it as being material deposited by glaciers" (in fact, in some of this overburden you can find Lake Superior agates). The second world-view has evidence for "the material to be deposited by a great flood." He was strongly implying the flood was Noah's Flood and one family immediately jumped on board with it. From across the pit, you could see the overburden contained huge boulders and other sediments down to sand-grained or smaller. I pointed that out to the guide and said that water sorts sediments by size (unless it's a tsunami event, and that's not a tsunami event located here), even in floods whereas glaciers deposit unsorted material in the form of glacial till. He countered with 'the fact that there was great evidence of being deposited by a flood' but was unwilling to explain his evidence. I again pointed out that Lake Superior agates are deposited from Minnesota all the way to Kansas due to glaciers picking them up the Lake Superior area and depositing them elsewhere. He stopped talking and walked away...
Even though glaciers were responsible for the overburden, humans did do a massive amount of work mining that made a big pit, now filled with water...
Near the museum, you can get into one of the other buckets, which Lukie and Lex thought were big...more on that later...
Inside the museum, the lower level discusses how mining occurred in the area and the geology. What caught their attention was the fossils found there...above Lex's right shoulder is an ammonite. They were related to a squid or octopus, which went extinct at the same time of the dinosaurs. I was there about a month earlier and someone in my group found an ammonite that was about 10 inches across. Lukie really wants to do the fossil hunt this summer, we didn't have time this trip...
The museum has a great geological column representing the rock layers starting below the iron formation to the surface...if you click on the picture, maybe you'll be able to read the top layer identified as 'glacial drift'...the tour guide should read the material in his own museum...
The upper level has converted the rooms to look like what rooms of the area would've looked like in the period...engineers, geologist, professionals, iron miners, school rooms, etc...
Lukie and Lex both said how big that pit is....
On the way to the state park we'd be camping at, we stopped in Hibbing to look at HibbTac's active pit. The old mine view was closed a few years ago because the company needed to mine in that area, so at the end of May this year, they opened a new mine view...
It didn't take them long to realize the scale of current mining operations doesn't compare to older operations...
I liked how this sign does a nice job of describing how iron is moved from the area to the mills on the lower lakes...
Lukie really wanted to take this for a drive...
The Hull-Rust pit is huge...the equipment is even bigger...I've been in this pit 2-3 times (was in it just a month prior) and have had haul trucks drive by the coach buses we're in...the size of the bus compared to the truck is not comparable...
The both enjoyed watching the trucks do their work from a distance, and as the mine view was closing, we took off...
A short twenty minutes later, we were setting up camp...
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