Buckeye Mine and Tailings, Minnesota

The Buckeye Mine is a closed and overgrown former iron mine, with a flooded open pit and the churned up tailings and processing area north of it. It is at the western end of the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, which extends for 90 miles east-north-east from here, with dozens of pits, tailings impoundments, and processing plants, active and inactive, one of the largest contiguous mining landscapes in the nation. It was the primary source for iron for the steel age, and continues to supply some of the same steel plants, primarily the big three along the southern shores of Lake Michigan, with the locally produced iron ore of this region, called taconite. The Iron Range is one of the few places where a five mile-long lake, like the one formed by the pit operations at Buckeye and nearby Taconite, can remain just one of many unnamed and largely unnoticed new landforms.