Download or read book Copper Country Explorer Field Guide No. 4 written by Michael Forgrave and published by . This book was released on 2015-08-07 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here at Copper Country Explorer we tell the legend of a forsaken empire that once reigned over the scenic shores of the Keweenaw Peninsula, an empire ruled by copper. In no other place in the world did it occur in such purity and abundance. Its discovery led to one of the great colonizations of the modern age, transforming the remote and rugged wilderness of the Keweenaw into an industrial metropolis of over 100,000 people. It was not to last however. After over a century of rule, the empire would draw its last breaths. The mines closed, the people left, and the industrial metropolis returned to the wilderness from which it had come. In its place would be only ruins, the crumbling remnants of a lost civilization we know today as the Copper Country. It is within the shadows of the lost empire that this field guide wanders, exploring the ruins and remnants of a land lost in time. While the empire may have fallen, its legacy endures - crumbling ruins buried in the rugged wilderness, soaring stacks rising high above sprawling forest, and grand sandstone buildings lining quaint village streets. It is this field guide's mission to document these glimpses into history, and share the stories they tell. Featured in this volume...In the beginning it was its innate natural wonder that first attracted people to Torch Lake, the region's abundance of virgin timber attracting French-Canadian lumberjacks to the region. It would be the deep and abundant waters of the lake itself, however, that would bring the most change to the region. Turns out those waters could not only feed the thirsty stamp mills of the Copper Empire, but their depths could accommodate the thousands of tons of waste tailings those mills produced. It was a match made in industrial heaven.In the end the lake's western shore would become lined by more then a dozen industrial sites along with a collection of villages and worker communities to support those sites. Then there was the lake itself, inundated with over 200 million tons of mine tailings and shrunk in size by nearly 20%. While the Copper Empire may be gone, its legacy is still visible along the shore and in the waters of a lake once only disturbed by the light of fishing torches.