As the Eagle River makes its way north towards the big lake it turns and tumbles its through a narrow gorge beset on all sides by sheer cliffs and rocky outcroppings that makes the river’s journey much more challenging. Its a beautiful and rugged landscape that looks more like something you’d find out west along some Rocky mountain stream. The topography also makes the river hard to walk due to the scarcity of level ground along its banks, resulting in explorers such as ourselves to hop-scotch our way across the boulders and rocks scattered across the riverbed. Soon we had stumbled across our first ruins, sitting conveniently alongside the river’s edge.

When the region’s premiere copper mining company - the Lake Superior Copper Company - folded up after only five years of profitless work along the Eagle River a new company was re-organized to take its place. Fittingly this new company was named the Phoenix, and like its mythical avian namesake would arise from the ashes of the Lake Superior Copper Company as a much stronger and vigorous mine. Its a mine that may not have been the region’s most profitable but managed to continue on for nearly three quarters of a century continuously re-inventing and adapting itself to ever growing challenges. These re-inventions and adaptations resulted in the continual evolution of the companies stamping facilities.

Sitting all alone up there it seems out-of-place and perhaps even lost. But there it was, a concrete footing smack dab in the center of the Baltic No. 2’s massive poor rock pile. Why it was up here we weren’t exactly sure, it was the first time we found anything atop a poor rock pile besides poor rock. Made of concrete, it was topped by a iron eye-loop along with a pair of holes on its shaft facing side. It looked to be a tie down of sorts, or perhaps a footing for a trestle or pulley stand. Either way its placement atop a rock pile was odd.