We walked back to the visitors center and got in the car to leave. I’d had a great time, but was feeling a little disappointed because I knew that there were some other ruined buildings, and I was a little sad that I wasn’t going to see them. Still you can’t have everything.

As we were driving away we reached a fork in the road. We were turning left, but as I looked down the right fork I was surprised to see in the distance what might have been a cluster of buildings. We couldn’t drive up the road, but I asked my friend if he would stop. He was a bit skeptical thinking that what I’d seen was just some buildings used by the Sterling Lake Adminstration. But he pulled over an off I went. As I got closer I found that there was indeed a group of building, and they were associated with old Lake Mine.

Two shafts lead into the Lake Mine. Workers began the Lake Mine by digging open pits in the hills above the shaft but soon tunneled under Sterling Lake. Today, the abandoned mine is 1,100 vertical feet below the lake’s surface at the shaft’s end. The mine’s main shaft is 2/3 of a mile long and runs downward at an angle between 12 and 25 degrees. In some places it is over 1,000 feet wide. Although filled with water, it was considered a dry mine when it was active. Three pumps, one at the bottom of the mine, a larger one near the center of the shaft, and one at the surface, removed what little water seeped into the mine. At considerable risk to their lives, workers removed more that 2.5 billion pounds of high-grade iron ore from the Lake Mine between 1843 and 1923. (information board).

I’m not entirely sure what the building in the foreground is, but I think it might be the concentrating mill. The two buildings in the background are the crusher and the dryer.

This well-preserved cluster of buildings from 1920 shows a visual diagram of the steps to turn crude ore into the feed for the furnace.

Taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OSS II