This week a new video on YouTube brings to life the underground world of Ely’s historic Pioneer Mine. Great photos, mainly in black and white, cross into the digital world. It’s a great step forward for presenting and preserving our mining history. Here’s why that’s important.
Today’s mining news is not about iron ore, it’s about copper, nickel, gold, platinum, palladium and other platinum group metals (PGMs). Just as iron built this country’s infrastructure and helped the United States to win two world wars, copper and other PGMs are helping us advance our digital infrastructure, from televisions to cellphones.
But in order to better understand where we’re going we need to understand where we’ve been. Thanks to volunteers with the Ely Arts and Heritage Center, that’s being done today.
Students in the Ely school system are now taking field trips to the Pioneer Mine as well as to Twin Metals Minnesota. The two facilities are located on either side of Miners Lake. In fact, Twin Metals is a stone’s throw from the location of Pioneer’s dismantled B-Shaft where millions of tons of ore was brought from 1,500 feet underground to the surface.
These school children are learning about geology and mining from yesterday’s and today’s mining employees. Wow! They are certainly fortunate to live in a great community like Ely, Minnesota.
At Twin Metals they hear from geologists about exploring our area for mineral formations that hold billions of tons of PGMs. Those minerals will make cellphones and tablets, windmills and piping, medical instruments and airplane engines.
At the Pioneer Mine they hear from miners who worked underground to bring blue hematite to steel mills from 1883 to 1967.
But what about those students who aren’t able to live here? Short of opening a new underground mining operation that will provide hundreds of jobs so their parents could move here, we have YouTube.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.elyecho.com/articles/2014/06/08/pioneer-mine-video-crossing-over-black-and-white-digital