For 130 years, workers excavated vast wealth from the Mesabi Iron Range for big companies out East. Today, that could change.
It might go west instead.
An entrepreneur plans to reclaim century-old iron ore waste from the Mesabi Iron Range for an innovative — though still aspirational — pig iron plant in west central North Dakota.
The proposal would require de-commissioning of the mining-themed Hill-Annex Mine State Park in Calumet, but also turn waste dumps across the Range into available land for forest regeneration or development. It’s part of a surprisingly unheralded surge of new iron mining across a hotly-contested checkerboard of previously abandoned west Range properties. Once emptied of its ore, this land could become an enormous canyon, later a massive lake.
This means jobs and new prospects for declining mining towns, but also more of the economic volatility that defines life on the Iron Range: High prices for iron and steel fuel a race for valuable untapped ore — before the bottom drops out yet again.
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