Wednesday was a beautiful day. It was 80º, sunny, and only a little breezy. We decided to go out and go for a walk along the Iron Ore Heritage Trail, which is a walking, biking, and skating trail along the waterfront of Lake Superior.
Marquette used to be a big iron producing area, but the processing has disappeared and only the mining of iron ore remains. They mine the ore and process it with lime to make iron pellets which they ship to smelting plants all over the world.
Back in the iron producing days, they needed a lot of charcoal so they had these huge kilns for making it.
There used to be 43 of these big beehive looking things along the Carp River mouth. This is the only one left.
We went a little farther down the trail and came to the public beach.
The public beach is right next to an electric power plant. The plant has been decommissioned and is in the process of being torn down. The long red thing in the water is a ship that just unloaded lime (the big white pile in the picture). We watched it leave (more on that later). The long dark thing at the right edge of the picture is the old ore dock. It used to have rails to load the ships with.
When we got to the other side of the power plant, that ship was just leaving.
A guy from the power plant was having lunch and watching the ship leave. You can see part of him in the third picture. He told us all about what was going here. He explained the ship unloaded lime which the iron mine uses to make iron pellets. The ship will go to the other side of Marquette and load up with iron pellets and take them to iron smelters all along the Great Lakes. They used to do the smelting here, but I guess the economics of that wasn't enough to keep them in business. He also told us what the ore dock was. He also said that there was a local photographer that takes underwater photos and the under the ore dock is all wooden pilings and it acts like a reef. He also told us that the ship was really two pieces. The back of the ship is really like a tug that fits into the big barge front end. I guess they use it to swap the tug to whichever barge part is ready to go next.
Here are close ups of the Ore Dock.
We didn't walk much past the power plant when we turned around. More pictures from the walk are on the Michigan Photo pages.
We were hot and thirsty so we went to a brewery called Ore Dock Brewing. That first picture above of the Ore Dock was taken from in front of the brewery. They don't serve food so we each had one beer. I had a Hazy Pale Ale and Jan had a blueberry wheat beer. When we went to the grocery store later that afternoon, I bought a 6-pack of the Hazy Pale Ale.
I am almost out of my home brews. I have one bottle of the Maple Breakfast Stout, one bottle of the Salty Dawg Gose, two bottles of the Over Inflated Tire Amber, and 7 bottles of my last batch of Bock. I do have a new yeast that is supposed to ferment in under a week so I will try that when we get to South Dakota and we will be sitting for a week. If I can keep it warm enough, it should be ready to bottle in 5 days. I can only hope that the weather is warm then. 90º would allow it to ferment in 3-5 days. Above 80º slows it down to 5-7 days. I will use a heating pad to keep it warm.
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