Soudan Underground Mine State Park

Mining began at Soudan in the 1880s, making it the first iron mine in a state that would become the great iron-producing region of the country. The ore here was hematite of exceptional purity, so rich and hard that it earned the mine its nickname as the Cadillac of underground mines. Because the ore ran deep and the rock was sound, the operation went underground rather than open-pit, following the vein down level after level.

By the time it closed in 1962, the mine had reached more than half a mile below the surface, its lowest level nearly 2,400 feet down. Rather than let it flood and fall away, the mining company gave the site to the state, which turned it into a park and kept the shaft, the cage, the hoist house, and the tunnels working so that visitors could go down the way the miners did.

This is the homeland of the Ojibwe, also known as the Anishinaabe, whose Bois Forte and Lake Vermilion communities have lived across the lakes and forests of northern Minnesota for generations. The state name itself comes from the Dakota, Mni Sota Makoce, and the northern lake country has long been shared and contested ground between Dakota and Ojibwe peoples.

The Ojibwe knew this country through the fur trade and the treaty era, when the discovery of iron and the arrival of the railroads transformed the region within a single generation. The mining towns that sprang up drew immigrants from across Europe, and the Range became a famous melting pot, but it was built on lands tied to Ojibwe treaty history, a layered past that the park's story sits within.

A tour begins at the surface among the old mine buildings, then loads into the cage, a steel elevator that drops down the main shaft at a good clip, the daylight vanishing overhead. In a matter of minutes riders reach the twenty-seventh level, more than half a mile down, where the air is cool and damp and utterly still.

From the shaft, a small electric train carries the group out along a level tunnel to the last working stope, the chamber where miners cut the final ore before the mine closed. Guides walk visitors through how the ore was drilled, blasted, and hauled up, and the dark, close tunnels give a vivid sense of the work. Because the temperature underground holds steady year-round, it is cool down there no matter the season above.

The mine's most surprising chapter came after mining ended. Scientists realized that the deepest levels, shielded from the sky by half a mile of solid rock, were an ideal place to search for elusive particles that stream through the earth, since the rock blocks out most of the interference that swamps such experiments at the surface. A laboratory was carved into the old workings for exactly that purpose.

For years, physicists ran experiments there hunting for dark matter and studying neutrinos, ghostly particles that pour through the planet by the trillions. Tours of the lab let visitors stand in the cavern where cutting-edge cosmology was done far below the north woods, a strange and wonderful pairing of nineteenth-century mining and twenty-first-century science in the same dark tunnels.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.