Edward Vielmetti is inviting you to A2B3 lunch on Thursday at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Miner's Revenge - bicycle race in Greenland, MI in an underground copper mine

Here's a novel reuse of an old copper mine - the Miner's Revenge bicycle race is using a 1/3 mile long section of the mine no longer in active use as a part of the race course.  Bring your own lights - it's dark in there.


The race is July 11-12, 2009, with free on-site camping for racers and a bonfire the night before. Greenland is near Ontonagon; the mine is owned by the Adventure Mining Company which also does walking tours as well as other more extreme mining adventures that involve rappelling down a mine shaft.

Trenary Outhouse Races 2009 - "Haul Your Arse to the Sweetest 16th Ever" - Feb 28, 2009

In Trenary, MI each year, when it's cold and snowy, they hold a race to see who can push an outhouse on skis (suitably decorated) the fastest down Main Street.

The official web site has many more details.

Past year's coverage:

2008: Trenary Outhouse Classic - Races show Yooper spirit from the Mining Journal's Winter Visitor's Guide has an interview with athlete Tom Felty

Tom said he built the outhouse in his yard back home and described it as a “conversation piece.”
Some of the outhouses built by competitors over the years were simple, stripped-down units built solely for the race. Others were quite elaborate and could be used for their original purpose.
“There ain’t nothing like this in Indy,” Tom Feltny said. “It’s something different. The first year I was here for it, I didn’t race. The next year I decided I better do it.”

Northern Michigan University's Military Science Department ROTC unit participated:

NMU ROTC participated in the 15th Annual Trenary Outhouse Race this Sat. 24 Feb. Members from the Wildcat Battalion had to created a wooden outhouse to compete in this local event. Their creation won first place in the design category. However, like the Jamacian Bobsled Team in the 1988 Winter Olympics, they sadly did not place as well as they planned or hoped in the actual race.

You do have to see it for yourself.

Rio Tinto "Eagle" sulfide mine project delayed due to market conditions (Forbes via AP)

as seen in Forbes

Poor markets delay construction of Michigan mine

By JOHN FLESHER , 02.12.09, 05:25 PM EST

Construction of a proposed nickel and copper mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula is being delayed because of poor market conditions, its parent company said Thursday.

But project manager Jon Cherry said the announcement by London-based Rio Tinto Group (nyse: RTP - news - people ) does not mean the Kennecott Eagle mine is off the table. Planning and preparations are continuing with the expectation that it eventually will be built, he said.

Rio Tinto is having other issues, mostly resulting from the same market forces that substantially cut the demand for their metals.  From Reuters:

By Raji Menon

LONDON, Feb 16 (Reuters) - Major investors in Rio Tinto (RIO.L: Quote, Profile, Research) (RIO.AX: Quote, Profile, Research) have poured scorn on efforts by the mining group to provide explanations of plans to raise $19.5 billion from state-owned Chinalco, shareholder sources said on Monday.

Over the weekend Rio Tinto held meetings with its largest investors to try to win support for the deal. Investors have complained that the deal ignores pre-emption rights, which should give right of first refusal to existing shareholders in any fund-raising. [ID:nSYD436504]

and Forbes again:

Options Drying Up For Rio Tinto

Tina Wang, 02.16.09, 05:10 AM EST

Angry investors may prefer stake sales or BHP Billiton to the Chinalco deal, but they may not be as lucrative.

Major shareholders of Rio Tinto are up in arms over the mining giant's proposed $19.5 billion deal with the Aluminum Corp. of China. But for all the discontent, Rio's other options to pay down its massive debt -- a rights issue or counterbids by BHP Billiton -- would likely raise much less than what the state-owned Chinese producer is putting up.

If you're following mines and mining, one good ongoing source is the Ore And More Top Ten, a daily 10 article clipping feed from Benjamin Cox, Chief Executive Officer of Roche Bay, an iron ore mining company which owns mining leases in Nunavut, Canada.

Michigan DEQ public meeting in Humboldt, MI on Kennecott plans to open old Humboldt Mill to process sulfide ores from Eagle Project sulfide mine

via Save the Wild UP:

Concerned citizens will get a chance on February 18 to voice their opinions on Kennecott's plans to re-open the old Humboldt Mill at a public meeting hosted by Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality

Kennecott Minerals bought the property last September with plans to process ore from its proposed Eagle Project. Without legal permits to develop Eagle, the company continues to push permits for this processing facility, which was not part of the original mine plan.

The Department of Environmental Quality would have to approve Kennecott's application before the company could reopen the facility. The meeting schedule is as follows:

Location: Humboldt Township Hall

Directions: Hwy 41 to M95. M95 south, 1 block, turn west on County Road FA. Follow signs to the Hall. Click here for map to Humboldt Township Hall.

Here's the DEQ page on the Humboldt Mill. There are a ton of PDFs with an environmental impact statement of sorts, but I haven't located yet the good map of the property showing what is there now and what is proposed.

4000 days of pasties

lifted straight from Matt Roush's Great Lakes IT Report

Pasty Cam marks 4,000th straight daily item on the Web
Next Tuesday, Feb. 10, the Upper Peninsula's Pasty Cam will publish its 4,000th consecutive daily picture and discussion. That's nearly 11 years without missing a single day. Personally, I don't know of any other daily feature Web site that has been around that long -- especially without missing a day. The daily cam is the brain child of Charlie Hopper, who fell in love with the Keweenaw as a kid at summer camp, and moved there for keeps in 1988 with his wife Edie and two kids after selling a software company. More.

That's a lot of photographs (and a lot of pasties).
You can follow Matt on Twitter - @mattroush .

Pocket docks of the Great Lakes, Patrick Cooleybeck, paper at the Society for Industrial Archaeology, Duluth MN 2003

a question about this paper came up in email; posting here to collect more.

Cooleybeck, Patrick—
Moshe Safdie & Associates, Somerville, MA

"Iron ore docks of the Great Lakes"

Pocket ore docks are monumental structures used to transfer iron ore from railway cars traveling from nearby mines to ships that carry the ore to steelmaking centers or transfer points on the Lower Great Lakes. These structures were constructed from wood, steel, or reinforced concrete. The twelve pocket docks that remain today are approximately 80 feet in height, 60 feet in width, and range between 900 to 2400 feet in length. Movable steel chutes project out over the water at a slight angle from the sides of the docks. The hinged chutes, which when lowered allow ore to drop into ships from storage bins in the dock, are located at twelve-foot intervals over the length of the dock and lend a sense of scale to these massive structures

This work will present a survey of the various types of the gravity-operated pocket docks, from the first wooden dock of 1857 in Marquette, Michigan to the latest concrete dock of 1944 in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The work will also present a brief look at the more recent conveyor-operated shiploading facilities built since 1956. A description of how pocket docks work and a brief history of the ore dock on the Great Lakes will be presented. Comparative drawings of wooden, steel, and concrete docks and shiploaders will be shown. A photographic survey of the existing docks on the Lakes will be presented, highlighting current conditions, structural alterations, removal of components, and threats to their future existence.

cell phone winter gloves

It's winter, your hands see cold so you are wearing gloves, but you need at least a few fingers free for your mobile phone. What designs work? The gloves I am wearing now have a flap to expose a sort of fingerless Mitten, and if I fold things right I can expose just two index fingers. I could imagine thumbs free gloves too.

Yellow Dog Plains sulfide mine update

Marquette, MI – Matt Johnson, director of the Governor’s Office for the Upper Peninsula, has resigned from his post and now works for Rio Tinto, the parent company of Kennecott Minerals. The company has an office in Ishpeming, MI, and is seeking to develop a nickel-copper mine on the Yellow Dog Plains, in addition to other mineral projects in the area.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, November 10, 1975

November 10, 1975.   I was 10, and I had a paper route delivering the Marquette MIning Journal, which means I was out delivering newspapers to the Marquette Harbor Lighthouse the day the Edmund Fitzgerald went down.  Television news in those days was black and white, and there's a clip of Harry Reasoner that plays at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum from the news the next day that I must have seen two dozen times which brings me back.  (sorry, no link, couldn't find it.)

There's lots too much to write about, but here's a few clips that are new to me this year.

(Bootleg) live Gordon Lightfoot singing The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

boatnerd's summary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald

from http://www.boatnerd.com/fitz/

The Fitzgerald cleared Superior, Wisconsin, on her last trip on November 9, 1975, with a cargo of 26,116 tons of taconite pellets consigned to Detroit. Traveling down Lake Superior in company with ARTHUR M. ANDERSON of the United States Steel Corporation's Great Lakes Fleet, she encountered heavy weather and in the early evening of November 10th, suddenly foundered approximately 17 miles from the entrance to Whitefish Bay (47º North Latitude, 85º 7' West Longitude)

The storm that sunk the Fitz

from Steve Ackerman and John Knox at U of Wisconsin Meteorology

On November 9 at 7 p.m. the National Weather Service (NWS) issued a gale warning for Lake Superior. In a gale, the wind speeds range from 34-40 knots. The NWS predicted east to northeasterly winds during the night, shifting to NW to N by the afternoon of November 10. At approximately 10:40 p.m. the NWS revised its forecast for eastern Lake Superior to easterly winds becoming southeasterly the morning of the 10th. At about 2:00 am November 10 the NWS upgraded the gale warning to a storm warning (winds 48-55 knots) with a prediction of "northeast winds 35 to 50 knots becoming northwesterly 28 to 38 knots on Monday, waves 8 to 15 feet". Around 2 a.m. the Captains of the Anderson and Fitzgerald discussed the threatening weather and decided to change their route. This safer route would take them northward, toward the coast of Canada. The northern route would protect them from the waves that the storm generated.

The disasterous weather of November 6-11, 1913

The Great Lakes Storm of 1913 (wikipedia) destroyed 19 ships, damaged 19 others and killed more than 250 people. Tales of Riverside has an account of the storm and photos of all of the ships lost.

The Little Brown Jug, and other Michigan - Minnesota connections

Since it's game day (Michigan at Minnesota) I thought I'd link to at least a few connections between Michigan and Minnesota.

1.  The Little Brown Jug is the trophy that goes back and forth between the two schools depending on which one wins the game.  It was originally purchased as a water jug for the Michigan team on an away game to Minnesota in 1903, it was left behind after the game (a 6-6 tie).  The Daily Gopher has an excellent roundup of the story (warning: Minnesota point of view) quoting from several Michigan football blogs.

Days later when Yost sent a letter requesting his water jug back, Cook replied saying "We have your little brown jug; if you want it, you’ll have to win it."

More on the Little Brown Jug, and on the Brown Jug (a South University campus bar and restaurant) at Arborwiki.

2.  Michigan shares a border with Minnesota along Lake Superior, and there is public transportation by ferry from Houghton, Michigan to Grand Portage, Minnesota via a stop at the Isle Royale National Park.  

Minnesota to Isle Royale ferry information:

Grand Portage Isle Royale Transportation Line began as a way for the Sivertson family of Lake Superior's north shore to transport their catch of freshwater fish from Isle Royale to Minnesota. It gradually expanded to include passenger service.

Michigan to Isle Royale ferry information:

Unlike other Isle Royale ferry services, the Ranger III was designed by the National Park Service specifically to bridge the gap between the mainland and the Island. It was built to withstand the Lake’s fierce storms and its ice breaking capabilities assist in opening the park in the spring. An experienced nine-member crew take great pride in not only maintaining the vessel, but in serving its passengers. The Ranger III’s Captain, Bill Hanrahan, a graduate of the Great Lakes Maritime Academy, has over 30 years of experience; the crews combined experience is just under 200 years.

3.  Ann Arbor, MI was the site of GopherCon '92, a 50 person workshop for developers and users of the Gopher information system, a pioneering Internet publishing system that was for some brief furry moment the hot new thing on MTV and bigger than that super-complicated World Wide Web hypertext thing.  Prentiss Riddle wrote up the trip report for it, and here's his writeup on my presentation at the time:

RELATED TECHNOLOGIES: Ed Vielmetti of CICnet gave a talk on "what we would be gathering to discuss if UMinn had never developed Gopher", meaning primarily World-Wide Web (WWW). WWW was developed for the high-energy physics community and serves as a model of what Gopher could do if a discipline-oriented virtual community invested in it
heavily. WWW is based on SGML (Standard General Markup Language"), an ISO standard for marking up text which WWW uses to implement hypertext. SGML is a bear and it is a significant investment of effort to properly add a document to WWW, but the result is quite powerful (for instance, WWW handles footnotes in hypertext).

The Internet periodically notices that Gopher is not dead; here are a survey of the current Gopher infrastructure from Jason Kottke, some April development from George Hotelling, and a manifesto from Bjorn Karger.