A spooky descent with fellow tourists too close for comfort, hard hats for protection from thousands of bats, and cool, dark insight into some of the most difficult working conditions in state history.
That description doesn't exactly conjure images of the great American vacation, yet every summer, travelers flock to the Soudan Underground Mine State Park on Minnesota's Iron Range. Some tour the two high-energy physics labs that have moved into caverns there, but most come to see the nation's only underground iron ore mine that you can visit.
The 90-minute tour is designed to give visitors a sense of what it was like for miners to work underground.
Forget the estimated 8,000 to 12,000 bats hibernating there -- visitors' fears are quickly averted to the noisy, unsettling, half-mile descent. Just as the miners did twice each day, tourists squeeze inside a rickety cage for a three-minute commute. A tour guide explains that miners were so tightly packed into the elevators that they'd have to store their lunchboxes between their legs or hold them above their heads.
Once visitors are underground, a train takes them through a tunnel to the last and deepest area mined before operations ceased in 1963. There they can wander and see lifelike displays of miners at work in claustrophobic quarters.
Returned above ground the way they came, most visitors leave with a new appreciation for the life of a miner.
