Soudan Mine 27th level
— the deepest dark in Minnesota, kept on purpose.
Not only on a wall.
Soudan Mine 27th level, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Half a mile below the surface of northern Minnesota, the 27th level is the last stop of the cage ride at Soudan. The drift opens into a cavern that physicists have used since the 1980s to listen for neutrinos and dark matter, particles that pass through earth itself. Above the cavern, the iron mine sleeps. The cage takes three minutes down.
The place, in three passes.
The 27th level sits 2,341 feet beneath the Vermilion Iron Range in northern St. Louis County, the lowest of twenty-seven mined levels in Minnesota's oldest iron mine. The Soudan workings opened in 1882 under the Minnesota Iron Company and were donated to the state by US Steel in 1962. The level is reached by a three-minute cage ride from the headframe at Tower, inside what is today Lake Vermilion-Soudan Underground Mine State Park.
At the bottom the temperature holds near 51°F all year and the air is still enough that the laboratory built into the rock can listen for events that happen only a handful of times a day. From the 1980s through 2016 the cavern housed the Soudan 2, MINOS, and CDMS experiments, hunting neutrinos sent from Fermilab and dark-matter candidates passing through the half-mile of rock overhead. The shielding the rock provides is what the silence is for.
Tours run daily late May through September and drop visitors a half-mile underground in the original miner's cage, then ride a small electric train along a rail drift to the deepest active stope. Hard hats are issued at the surface and the route is guided by Minnesota DNR interpreters. The state park separately offers tours of the physics laboratory cavern. Reservations are recommended on summer weekends; the cage holds a limited group at a time.
