Adventure Mine Tour

Entrance to an "Adventure"

October 8, 2012

Another day to revisit somewhere we'd been before.  When we took the Senior Color Tour on September 27th we passed a place I wanted to return to and we finally did.  It is a place near Greenland, Michigan called the Adventure Mine.

One of the entrances

This particular mine operated between 1850 and 1920 and removed more than 11 million pounds of native copper from the ground.  Over the years, it was opened several more times but the owners could never make the mine profitable again.

This piece of copper weighed over 300 pounds!

The mine is an actual open underground copper mine where you can go on various tours, depending on how much of a mining experience you wish to have.  There are several options:  the Trammer's Tour, the Prospector's Tour, the Miner's Tour and the Captain's Tour.  We opted to take the Prospector's Tour which was described as moderately difficult and lasted for about an hour and 20 minutes. 

Our tour guide demonstrating the early tools

Checking out "treasure"

Things found in the mine over the years

 Wow!  Jim and I got what amounted to a private tour.  Our tour guide was a young girl who really seemed to know her stuff about the mine.  She regaled us with lots of information relating to how the miner's worked, how the mine equipment operated and other tidbits relating to the bats that live in the mine.  We saw lots of bats.

Oodles of bats!

More bats

  Apparently they are getting into hibernation mode with the onset of the cold weather.  They were hanging everywhere we went in the tunnels and in some of the larger caverns.  We wore hard hats with headlamps attached and roamed through quite a bit of one level of the mine. 





Jim wasn't as keen as I was to go on this tour but we both ended up having a good time and doing something else that not every tourist can say they've done!

Coming out of the mine