Electric Revolution
For over a century, steam was king in the Copper Country. Fed from the millions of chords of wood growing across the Keweenaw, boilers bred steam to be used in almost every piece of equipment at a mine. Hoists, compressors, pumps, crushers, stamps – everything was powered by steam. Companies constantly built bigger and badder steam engines, reaching monstrous proportions and providing thousands of horsepower in the process. But soon steam faced a stiff competitor: electricity.
The Rock Pile
It is a standard practice for us at Copper Country Explorer to climb any poor rock pile we find, and the Gratiot pile would be no different. However, walking up to the looming man-made mountain gave us some second thoughts. It was much more steep then previous piles, and to make matters worse it was littered with debris. Hundreds of feet of coiled hoist cable wound up and down its sides possibly making climbing it a bit more difficult.
Ruin in the Trees
Now hoist buildings are generally easy to find. Usually they lie in line with the shaft and rockhouse, to the east / southeast from the shaft. To make it even easier, a line of footings for the cable stands that once supported the hoist cable would lie like breadcrumbs from the shaft to the hoist. So that’s what we did – follow the breadcrumbs. What the breadcrumbs led us to – deep into the wooded area behind the rock pile – was a ruin that looked like the hoist, but later we would find out couldn’t be.
Dark Tunnels
The identity of the mystery building yet to be determined, turned our attention back to the goal at hand: finding the hoist. While we knew that the hoist had to be in the direction we were heading, the woods were become thick and impassible. Instead of fighting our way ahead we decided to take the easier route and head out to the road. While we say road, it isn’t exactly that. It is the same dirt two track that ran between the shaft building and the dry, now heading east towards what we hoped was the hoist.
From Inside the Hoist
An inside look at the Gratiot Hoist building in a 360 view from the hoist pedestal itself. Get the big picture of this modern hoist ruin by clicking on the image below.