<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>And not, as some may have erroneously thought, in North-Eastern Africa.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br /><img src="/images/icons/tongue.gif" /><br /><br />Although it is pronounced exactly the same way, the small mining town (with no working mine for decades) is distinguished from the African nation by the letter "o". Soudan, Sudan. It's a small town, like most in the Arrowhead, and today its primary business is wilderness and hunting outfitting, and a few local backwoods resorts on Lake Vermillion. The Soudan Underground Mine is a historical site, and is also a state park. It was the first iron mine in North America, an underground shaft dug into bedrock so tough you don't even need to shore up the walls. The mine closed down when more economical strip-mining began. Today, you can visit the mine and see exhibits about life in the early days, when Czech and Slovak immigrants came into the region. (Even today, there are tensions from that; there are bars you only go into if you are Czech and bars you only go into if you are Slovak.) One entrance has been closed to human visitors and is now a bat sanctuary. And two artificial caverns have been added to house physics experiments, which can also be toured by the public. There's a big mural on one wall that is said to be quite fun to look at, commissioned by a wife of one of the researchers to give the people down there something to look at it.<br /><br />Mining does continue in the Arrowhead, although rising labor costs are beginning to get some mining companies to pull out. My aunt is head of one of the mining companies; they have resolved not to pull out, no matter what. Minnesota was once the source of all of the steel used in Detroit, and was hugely important during the war effort in the 1940s, but that is no longer true. It is not due to the iron running out. Even the Soudan mine is far from being mined out. The area is incredibly rich in iron; many of <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>