Copper Country Explorer Field Guide No.4

In the beginning it was its innate natural wonder that first attracted people to Torch Lake, the region’s abundance of virgin timber attracting French-Canadian lumberjacks to the region. It would be the deep and abundant waters of the lake itself, however, that would bring the most change to the region. Turns out those waters could not only feed the thirsty stamp mills of the Copper Empire, but their depths could accommodate the thousands of tons of waste tailings those mills produced. It was a match made in industrial heaven.In the end the lake’s western shore would become lined by more then a dozen industrial sites along with a collection of villages and worker communities to support those sites. Then there was the lake itself, inundated with over 200 million tons of mine tailings and shrunk in size by nearly 20%. While the Copper Empire may be gone, its legacy is still visible along the shore and in the waters of a lake once only disturbed by the light of fishing torches.