Spectacular Kennecott Mill Town tour on June 14, and Root Glacier tour on June 15

I started talking about and illustrating this portion of the trip earlier, with a few photos of our campsite overlooking the Copper River. We then had something like ninety miles on a somewhat rough road to get to McCarthy. It was a beautiful drive...

The town of McCarthy and the nearby town built by Kennecott Copper to support the workers at their hugely successful copper mine were very much worth the effort to get there and see them. Over two hundred miles of railroad had to be built from the coast town of Cordova to McCarthy, involving hundreds of wooden trestles, six of which had to be rebuilt every spring due to being wiped out by spring floods. The town had to be built before the mines could start operating. Every building in the town was heated by steam heat provided by the power plant. Doctors were kept onsite 24/7, and had such a good reputation that patients would come from hundreds of miles away to be seen. The mill is where the copper ore was literally smashed into bits, and then, by several means, the copper was separated from the rock host. The ore was delivered by an overhead tramway after an airy trip from mines well away from the mill. It entered on the top floor of this fourteen-story building...

Set in this magnificent setting...

Note the miles-wide moraine in the foreground, showing the detritus on top of still-very deep ice...

Once inside the mill, the ore went down, down, down through a series of very loud physical crushing processes. This mill was built roughly between 1900 and 1911, and was active until 1938. By current-day currency values, it produced over a billion dollars worth of copper. An interesting sidelight - a very small amount of silver is produced as a by-product. The value of this silver was enough to pay for all the railroad and town-building! This was state-of-the-art Industrial Revolution technology at its best.

Pipes in the mill for steam heat....

The vats below were used for chemical leeching of the ore to get the copper (and silver) out of the mix...

Below is one version of a "shaker table", used at a diagonal, descending angle, to separate bits of copper from worthless rock...

These huge boilers were part of the chemical leeching process...

The tour was conducted by professional guides from St. Elias Alpine Guides. They did a fabulous job, herding about twenty of us through the mill on steep, very steep ladders with plenty of places to bang your head. Hard hats were part of the deal.

This tour was the afternoon of June 14th. The next day, we came back to the mill and were picked up by another great St. Elias guide who took us on a six-mile plus hike on the Root Glacier. It was magnificent!

Our traveling companions, Bruce and Margie, who also had a Terranova..

We watched a thirty-something female partially disrobe, and then jump, feet first holding her nose, into this pool of 34 degree water. She didn't stay in long. Said the "cold water clears my head". No kidding.

The crampons we needed to wear...

Here's one intrepid adventurer!!!