October 10 - Iron Mountain, Michigan

We drove into Iron Mountain where we started our Volksmarch from a hotel on Highway 2. First we made a short loop out to the county courthouse, a rather picturesque building, and returned almost to our starting point. Then we headed uphill to an overlook but found the view of the town obscured by haze, which was disappointing. The route continued past an old mine that has been colonized by thousands of brown bats since it closed in the early 1900s; it is now a sanctuary for thousands of hibernating bats! It would have been interesting to see the little critters but disturbing their hibernation would have been impolite so we continued on our way down the hill to Lake Antoine. We had nice views along the way of the lake nestled in the fall foliage colors.

The second checkpoint was the ruins of the Ardis Furnace, an early experiment in refining low-grade iron ore at the site of production rather than shipping the ore out to be refined. The furnace worked, after a fashion, but proved to be unreliable and basically uneconomical so it was abandoned. Nevertheless it signified the type of innovation that was so important to the economic development of our country in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The method that won out in the long run was a simple conversion of the basic iron ore into taconite pellets which were shipped south on the lake freighters to the steel mills.

We zigzagged back to Highway 2, the main north-south highway that bisects Iron Mountain, and crossed the Chapin pit. This looks like nothing so much as a small lake in the middle of town, but it is actually a collapsed mine pit that has filled with water over the decades. It looked like a great place for a swimming hole, but it was fenced off and posted. At the Cornish Pump and Mining Museum on the last part of our walk I asked about it and was told that swimming was prohibitively dangerous due to a very deep bottom and tricky currents coming from the old shafts.

We had a nice time doing this walk, and a person could easily spend another couple of hours in the two museums along the way, but it did have some hills and probably deserved its 2+ rating. Any future walkers should also be wary of several sections where you have to walk on the left side of a street due to a lack of sidewalks—we found that some of the local drivers were reluctant to move over and give walkers any space. For that reason I would strongly recommend not doing this walk in the rain or when snow or ice would make footing treacherous.

After our walk we had lunch in a local frozen custard shop called Storheims that was somewhat like Culvers but with a more limited menu of entrees. One thing they offered that Culvers did not, however, was a “Schaumtorte” dessert. Monika said in Germany this would have been a confection of meringue and whipped cream, but here they had a thick layers of meringue and ice cream covered by hot fudge and another layer of whipped cream (Maraschino cherry on top, of course). Altho definitely not suitable for a diabetic or someone on a low fat diet, I thought the American version was rather an improvement on the original German dessert. Again the portions were so generous that this is a dessert to share with at least one other person, so I let Monika have some rather than wolfing it down all by myself.

We went shopping and then spent about an hour visiting the Cornish Pump and Mining Museum on our way back to camp, but I would only recommend it to those who are really interested in seeing mining artifacts or reading blurbs about the histories of all the local mines. For the rest of the afternoon Monika washed the clothes while I worked on the journal and wrote some letters to our friends and relatives.