Along The Cliffs
The Cliff Range was home to many mines, one of which was the first profitable mine to exist in the Copper Country. It was in the middle of the nineteenth century that the Cliff Mine blossomed into an industrial juggernaut. Working a fissure vein at the Greenstone flow, the mine worked the cliffs from all angles; shafts at its base, adits driven into its face, and even by shafts sunk into their top.
Two Mines in One
Moving away from the cliff face we walked deeper into the woods until coming across a small road cutting through the woods. We followed it around a corner and came to a large expanse of poor rock spreading out in all directions. We quickly realized that we had walked out from the woods directly on top of it. Various gullies fanned out from the road, some over twenty feet in depth. Once this entire area was a shallow valley, and now had been almost completely filled in with poor rock.
A Hoist and Boiler
Once it had become apparent that the copper was not in the bluff, the mine turned its attention back to the cliff base, around the site of its original copper-rich drifts. There a second vertical shaft was sunk, straight down into the recently discovered copper lode. This shaft (known as the Avery Shaft in honor of Dr. Charles Avery) would receive the bulk of the mine’s attention, manpower, and resources. When the mine turned to steam power, a massive five-story hoist building and boiler complex was built at the Avery Shaft. That original hoist building was destroyed by fire, but was quickly replaced by a building who’s remains can still be found in the thick woods today.
Drifts and Shafts
In the Cliff’s infancy almost all the ground was opened up through a series of drifts that had been driven into the hillside. At the time it was believed that the copper was incased in the soaring cliffs themselves, and the copper-rich ground that the drifts were encountering were just validating that claim. However, as the drifts were driven deeper into the hillside the great copper fortunes quickly faded. The copper was not in the soaring ridge-line after-all, but instead was in fact under them.
A Cliff Ruin Map
The Cliff Mine is probably the most explored ruins in the Keweenaw, for good reason. The sheer awe of finding towering rock walls and smoke stacks rising up within the thick forest here is something most of us never forget. Though hard to do it justice here on these pages, the site is a must-see for almost anyone interested in Copper Country history. Both the resourcefulness of man and the resilience of nature share the stage along these towering cliffs - a sacred battleground between man and nature. The scattering of ancient graves along the cliff base, most of them children, remind us of the unforgiving nature of the northern wilderness and man’s struggle for survival. The towering rock piles and sprawling stamp sands remind us of the other side of the story - man’s destructive impact on his environment. Both should be heeded by all generations.