It was cliff No. 4 Shaft, Calumet and Hecla dewatered and reopened Cliff through No. 4 Shaft in the 1950’s I believe, and did a large amount of drifting and diamond drilling. I believe they also dewatered South Cliff since the two are connected. They didn’t ever do much at North Cliff since it never showed much promise, they probably did drill it at depth from No. 4 Shaft though. If I remember right the mine was dewatered due to a strong geo-physical anomoly in the mine area, The articles about this canbe found in the MTU archives.

Joe - maps I have had marked North Cliff just a little bit north of the cliff face, roughly where I thought this mine was located. Since this is not North Cliff, where was North Cliff in relation to the Cliff we all know? Just wondering. The concrete foundations match up with a 1950’s exploration however, and it makes a lot of sense. The whole idea of reopening the cliff seems a little desperate to me. C&H must of really been worried about their future at that time.

According to the map on page 107 of Donald Chaput’s “The Cliff” the North Cliff mine was located northwest of The Cliff mine. The number one shaft is approximately 2 3/4 miles northeast of Cliff Drive. The shafts are numbered from the northwest to the southeast. The first four are fairly close together. The number 5 shaft is about 3/4 of a mile southeast of the rest. According to the map they are in section 26, township 57 north , range 32 west. The shaft s are listed as being on the Cliff Mine Lode. The map entitled ” Geological Diagram of the Pittsburgh and Boston Mining Location” The infamous Samuel W Hill’s name is under the title. The number one shaft is approximately 1/4 mile south of Silver Creek.
According to the “Picture Credits” lists the Marquette County Historical Society as the source of the map.

Dave is right, north cliff is a bit farther north, To get to the north cliff adit you muct take two tracks around the back side of the cliff and its kinda hard to find if you don’t know where to look. Reopening cliff wasn’t nessicarily desperate, the best place to look for new mines is where old mines were, and the goephysical data suggested there might be a decent amount of copper left. Plus when cliff was shut down they didn’t have as advanced exploration equipment, knowledge, or enough money to explore. C&H dewatered and sunk new shafts on several old deposits during that period including Central and White Pine (the later of which they obviously sold to Copper Range and unknowingly killed their best chance to survive.)

Thanks guys for the info. I’ll have to change the post to reflect the new info. I know when we were up behind the cliff last fall we ran into a hunter who pointed us down a trail to the north (shown on my cliff lookout map) and said that was were the old town of “North Cliff” was located. The other trail led to this mine site, which led me to believe this was North Cliff. This spring we’ll take another hike up there and take a look for the real North Cliff. Thanks again.

I used a map entitled “Geologic Map of the Phoenix Quadrangle, Michigan Bedrock Geology” to add to the above posts. The measurements stated below are approximate. There is a triangulation station in the small park where US 41 and Cliff Drive come together at the north end. I used this station as a reference point for the following measurements. The number one shaft is 1.35 miles to the northwest. The bearing from the station to the number 1 is 303 degrees. The bearing to the station is 57 degrees. Also the map shows an adit that starts about 400 feet to the northwest of the number one shaft. It runs at the same angle as the shafts run. It connects to the number one and two shafts. It extends about 400 feet past the number two shaft.

The North Cliff was organized in September 1858. Operations were suspended in 1860. In 1859 2,435 pounds of copper were produced. Then in 1864, 3,222 pounds were produced. It appears there were no operations at this sight after 1864. This information is from USGS professional paper number 144.

Dave - well now I have no excuse whatsoever. Thanks for the directions. I really need to get myself some GPS equipment since that would make finding these older mines a lot easier. For the most part we use old roads, trails, and railroad grades to find mines. This is under the assumption that most interesting places would be off of one of these. But we’re running out of finds using that method however.

Because of this I plan to take this blog into a little different direction this summer. Part of it is to take some time in the archives to get some materials to use on this site. Another part is to get into more analysis and interpretation of the ruins we find. All this requires more field work like what you have provided me here. Thanks again.

I’ve been out to cliff a bunch of times in the five years i spent at tech and never found the adit there… ;( anyway, I was wondering if any of you had been in it and how far back it goes? anything cool?

Mike, which adit, there are several, but you can’t get into any of them through the adit, you have to go down shafts, and I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t know what your doing. Theres not much to see in them either way, most of the stoping is underwater, and the drifts have been stripped of everthing but a bit of rail here and there.

Joe-

I “climb around” up there a fair bit…often times with my daughter who’s 12. Are the shafts pretty obvious or should I be scared….very scared!!??

Steve,
Ive been all around there, most of the shafts are fairly easy to see, there is one that is in the bush that is hard to see but its off the beaten path a bit (at least it was the last time I was there, two years ago.) The best thing to do at these sites is just be aware of your surroundings, usually old shafts are surrounded by barbed wire fence, so if you see barbed wire in the woods don’t cross it. Also if you see a random rock pile in the woods with no barbed wire, I wouldn’t venture too close to the rock pile. Other than that, have fun taking your daughter out in the wonderland of the Keewenaw!

Thank you Joe….we DO have fun and plan on continuing to!!

Back while I was at MTU we did quite a bit of traipsing around the Cliff. I can’t tell you exactly where we were (other than behind the “major” ruins and rock piles fairly far north), and I doubt I could find it again, but we found what appeared to be a tunnel of some sort. It was right at the base of the cliff and at one time was completely buried (accidentally or on purpose?) in a pile of rock and dirt. Erosion had opened a small hole at the top of the pile. The tunnel was about 6 foot square going horizontally into the cliff wall. The floor was covered in loose rock and about three inches of water. It seemed to go back (west) about 20-30 feet and then turn to the left (south). One very skinny member of our group shinnied through the hole and using a stout branch to probe the floor went about 10 feet inside before common sense overtook him and he came back out. I have no idea if this was an adit or what else it might have been. I think this would have been fall of ‘85 or spring of ‘86. I imagine that if this was discovered by anyone “official” that it’s been reburied by now.

Dale, it sounds like the North American adit, its actually south of the Cliff Mine about a mile, is this right am I off base?

Joe, that could very well be the place. Memory is rather fuzzy after all these years. We could have been further south than I remember being.

Dale / Joe…
It sounds like the North American adit to me as well. We had stumbled across it in a subsequent excursion and your description Dale matches up exactly. What we found was half buried as well, although I might of been from run-off coming down the cliff face. Only about a couple of feet was open at the top, but as far as we could tell it didn’t go back very far. Never entered it though (too dark for pictures anyway) The adit at Cliff is sealed up by a rock wall I think - but I could be wrong.

I have a question maybe someone can help me with or a little confusion with some of the maps out there. What I always thought of as the Cliff mine was just off of Cliff drive before it comes back to 41(south of Phoenix). And have a map and several web sites that show this. But in looking up GPS info at a site called mindat.org, both the north and south cliff mines are placed east/south of Phoenix and north of the Phoenix mine(I had always thought these where the Phoenix Mining co mines). Also info I have says it was the Phoenix mine that was reopened by HC(1928)

Have my maps and info been wrong on the Cliff mine(s) or is the GPS info from mindat.org screwy?

Mike, I’ve found that mindat is often very inaccurate. The satellite images on maps.live.com don’t show any poor rock piles in the locations indicated by mindat. There are several poor rock piles for the Cliff mine, both up the cliffs and near their base. I think mindat’s data is contributed mostly by travelling rockhounds who may not be from the area, so they could get the location wrong.

Mike..
When looking for mines I currently use the Mindat.org coordinates along with arial images to find rock piles (as dcclark notes is the easiest way to find these places). I have found the Mindat.org to be generally correct but there has been a few times when they were off. As of late they have updated their site with a rather extensive disclaimer about not using the data to actually hunt for mines, so I think they might of had some liability issues. (which I always fear for me site) It might be possible that they “generalized” the data to be not so specific. But that’s just paranoia on my part I think.

I recently noticed that mindat.org puts the Quincy Mine in southern Houghton. Whether they’re intentionally fuzzing the locations or they’re really just that inaccurate, I don’t think they’re very safe to rely on any more.

Thanks for all the input. Yes I started to notice that there were several other mines that are miss- placed or miss-named on minedat. I’ve started to use the GPS in combination with the arial photos from terraserver. Thanks again. And want to say love this site. I found it, through that article in the Mining Gazette a few weeks back. We were on our way back home from Isle Royal. I’ll throw out another question to you. My dad was at Tech in the early 50’s and has told stories of a mine up the hill at the west end of campus. Behind a house used as the forestry/botany building(no longer there and no idea exactly where this building would have been). The main shaft was capped(blocked) but there was a adit? that they could get into it through. When I was at tech in the early 80’s this was and still is all houses there. Any idea what or where he is talking about??

Hey Mike, you don’t happen to have a link to the Mining Gazette article about the CCE site?

Sorry Jay I don’t. I don’t even think they placed the article on line, all I have is a few copies of the printed version. If they ever do I’ll throw a link up…

There is a mine shaft almost straight down the cliff from no 3 shaft of cliff mine in the waste rock almost 20 feet up the cliff I assumed this was North American mine shaft I could be wrong, but there is something there. From what I can till by looking at your map the Avery shaft at the base of the cliff is totally filled up with rock and collapsed timbers,

If the mineshaft your talking about is a little
4 X 2 X 4 hole, its not a mineshaft, but a boiler hole, its filled with ash, Below the shaft on top of the hill is an adit, but it is, or at least was as of this summer completely covered, Id advice against climbing around on that pile of poor rock, directly under that shaft, Theres barbed wire and fence poles, normally meaning a covered shaft

I doubt it was a boiler hole, this is where I saw that guy climbing out from under some timbers that was supported by an auto jack, he seemed to think that he had found a mine shaft and lucky for him he lived to tell about it. Looking at the map this is the general area of the avery shaft. Stay along the base of the cliff there was something there that maybe worth taking a picture of, you will find it, just watch where your stepping.

where probably talking about two different things,

I know for a fact what i saw was stone lined, twelve feet long, slightly curved, and filled with white ash, not coal fire ash, wood, a bit of debris in there, metal rails and a plaster roof

low low headroom gets deeper a bit into it, but ends at a collapsed end, (it runs Parallel to the cliff, but opening looks like it goes into it)

I will have to get back up there some time you have me curious now and that area is a maze. The shaft I found on top of the cliff was covered by a metal grate. I went to get my buddy and for the life of me I could not find it again nor any other time I went back to that area. You may see steam coming out of it in the winter if it is still there.

Strange, no idea on where it was? same area as cliffs?