The Kennicott copper mine near McCarthy, AK was a very productive mine from 1910 to 1938. It produced over $200 million of copper and in today’s money would be a couple of billion. It primarily fed the voracious appetite for copper to build the electrical wiring network on the East coast. The mine is five miles up in the mountains and transported the copper ore to the processing facility via overhead tram. These red buildings are the processing and sorting facility where they smashed and separated the copper from other rocks, bagged it and sent it via train to Cordova, AK and then to a smelter in Tacoma, WA via ship. The facility is fourteen stories high and utilized gravity to assist in the sorting process.
Now a national park with daily tours.
From the top.
On to Kennecott and the glacier.
Ore smashers.
Bulk sorting table.
Crusty miner at one of the sorting tables.
A few of the forty sorting tables.
Sorting table works just like panning for gold. Copper has a heavier specific gravity then the other minerals surrounding it and these mechanized tables shook the ore into these grooves where it was collected at one end as the waste flowed to the other side.
Ammonia tanks to leach out the remaining copper from the waste ore.
Ammonia tank separators.
Quasimoto looking for his bell in the attic.
Power plant.
Alaskan flowers surround the mine and glacier.