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St. Louis Mine
East of Calumet, Houghton Co., Michigan
(Now a private property, no trespassing!)
    I was reading "Red Metal Retreat" parchment which has a list of copper mines with each mine listing minerals found there and I noticed that St. Louis Mine's list includes agates. After obtaining some info on the location of St. Louis mine, I explored the mine dump and started finding some of the most colorful agates I have ever seen coming from any copper mines and quite few came with copper inclusions. I found it strange that St. Louis mine is located far away from Kearsage Lobe and I learned that it was located on a small Copper City Lobe. Maybe only two or three mines were set on that lobe compared to so many mines along much longer and thicker Kearsage lobe.
    There are two different types of agates found there. The small "purple" agates come with purple primary bands and often have quartz and pumpllyite centers. They're generally found in one spot.
     Found in the greenish basalt rocks at specific places around the mine dump are more colorful and sharply banded agates. Red, white, pink, orange, purple, and yellow colors are widespread in those agates and they can have interesting banding structures like "eyes" or mushroom-like growths. They're notoriously difficult to extract out of the basalt rocks and that might be why few people bothered to search for them since they fracture easily when they tried to hammer the agate-bearing rocks. It's still possible to find some loose nodules only in specific places due to the way the miners distributed the mine dump rocks. Amethyst nodules are found there also. Expect to see widespread fractures in the agates due to the blasting processes the miners used to break the basalt beds in search for copper sources.

YOU CAN CLICK ON THE PICTURES TO SEE LARGER PICTURES 
All agates are found by myself (one time a year in August)

agate
agate agate
Typical colorful agates
Shadowing effects
bit of copper inclusion
agate agate agate
contrasting bands
My best find!

agate agate agate
"Eyes"
Purple color

agate agate
Large agate nodule
Red agates, reminds me of
Lake Superior agates.



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