Soudan Mine

Northern Minnesota's great underground mine, in 1996. Soudan Underground Mine State Park , way up north in The Range at Tower . My favorite underground mine tour; highly recommended. Excellent guides, better-than-usual equipment, and the tour actually goes deep underground. Camera: Chinon Genesis III. Scanned from a slide.

Soudan Underground State Park, Tower, Minnesota, 1990.

Continuing our Soudan Mine tour. As you can see, the mine commanded the local high ground; that's Tower Soudan, Minnesota, down below. Terrific view. Soudan Underground State Park; 1990. Shot with my Minolta Freedom camera.

Despite the substantial headframe on the mine's site, this mining location is dominated by the crusher/loader complex which broke the ore into manageable pieces and loaded it on trains. This is the ore loader. Soudan Mine Underground State Park, Tower, Minnesota, 1990.

Minnesota's Soudan Underground State Park, at Tower, in 1990. This headframe tops a shaft which goes down about half a mile....

A very different view of the loader at Soudan Mine Underground State Park, Tower, Minnesota. The Duluth, Missabe, and Iron Range railroad line ran beneath this structure; these tracks moved the ore from the crusher to the loader. Really a marvelous artifact. Photo taken in 1990 with a Minolta Freedom 100.

One last photo from our 1990 visit to Soudan Mine Underground State Park in Tower, Minnesota.