A 5000-mile road trip through some of the
highest points of the Eastern United States, July 12-24, 1998
MISSOURI & CAHOKIA, ILLINOIS This was each of ours only time to Missouri. We passed by Branson (the new Nashville!?). There was plenty of road construction there, provided some decent road cuts for the bored Geologist. We headed for St. Louis, bound for Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site (City of the Sun) in Illinois, the site of an ancient Indian Civilization. See the above link for details. We visited a few of the mounds and woodhenge.
Ryan and a huge mound and telling time at woodhenge.
ILLINOIS (Coal Country) After our visit there we pressed on to Illinois to visit the Rooster, a life-long coal miner. When we got to his town, I rang him up, hearing his voice for the first time. (We had only conversed via email, making plans for me to get some of his pyrite suns.) He said he'd be there in a few minutes, so Ryan and I fed beef jerky to our hungry stomachs and waited for the Rooster. He showed up soon enough and we followed him out into the country to his house.
We enjoyed some great sandwiches including the best corn-on-the-cob on the planet! Rooster and I traded pyrite suns for the obsidian I purchased at Colemans and some tumbled stones I toted from Florida (purchased as part of a large collection earlier in the year).
If you've ever spent time talking with a coal miner, maybe you have noticed what I did for the first time when speaking with Rooster. Coal miners love their job! They take great pride in being a coal miner, and why shouldn't they...they certainly earn their pay! But, you may wonder why they love it...being below ground for an eight hour shift, facing danger every minute from either the heavy equipment, roofs failing, the risk of explosion, black lung. You name it, there are plenty of dangers.
From what I inferred from the Rooster, coal miners love their job and take price in their job because they like to work hard and they have a team spirit where each one relies on the other to do their job and do it safely. People devote their lives to coal mining, not just because they up and decide to be a coal miner, but because their father was a miner, and his father's father was a coal miner. generation by generation, people fill the need. [Come to think of it, I can't really explain why coal miners like their jobs so much, ask one for yourself and come to your own conclusions.] (Although the movie October Sky is about a rocket scientist, it lends great insight into lives of the coal miner).The Rooster lead us out to a plot of land where we camped for the night. Setting up a camp at night is always a challenge, never knowing what we are camping on, but it turned out alright. We slowly awoke the next morning in a field of lush green grass, crickets chirping, birds flying, and a mist over the pond. We took time to fed the albino cat fish and ourselves, then continued our courtship with coal and went to the National Coal Mining Museum in West Frankfurt, Illinois.
The museum offers a great tour of an now-closed coal mine 600 feet below ground at the only vertical shaft coal mine open to the public in the world. This is a great tour because you are lead around by an actual coal miner with very colorful stories about what it is like to be coal miner in the Eastern US (as opposed to the low-sulfur coal mines of the West). Another cool part about this tour is they let you take bituminous coal samples home with you. So, of course, I grabbed the biggest piece I could find, I darn sure got dirty carrying it. Anywho, I got it all the way up to the parking lot, and I dropped it! Yep, busted into about 10 pieces. What a mess.
(Inside a coal mine; a coal mining machine; me in the Joy 12 miner; a safe place)
Tour of the National Coal Mining Museum in West Frankfurt, Illinois.(More about Coal Mining)
As a side note, Rooster described the machine pictured in the two middle photos...The Joy 12 continuous miner is the machine that actually mines the coal. The Joy 12 is 37' long, with a cutter head width of 15'. It runs on 995 volts AC and weighs about 35 tons. The cutter head attacks the coal seam and the chewed up coal is passed from the cutter head to the back 'bed' which can be dumped into other apparatus for eventual haulage to the surface. Most all (if not all) coal mining heavy equipment if electric. For obvious reasons (noise, air quality) these machines are especially designed to work coal. Engineered to fit through the low, narrow corridors, they must be disassembled at the surface and reassembled below ground.The safest place in the mine (as I referred to it above) was constructed after a major roof failure. The arch structure can support itself if under a roof that is collapsing. They are used in travel ways and belt lines. These can be placed in the area of a fault because if the roof collapses, it does not damage this arch.
From Coal Country of Illinois, we headed south, our next goal is near Louisville, Kentucky. We stopped at Cave-in-Rock, Illinois because of the name, I thought it'd be cool. Little did I know then, but this location is famous for fluorite specimens. Being a good rockhound, I was able to come up with a few pieces that I pulled from rubble used to stabilize a slope (something is better than nothing). We visited the actual cave which is right on the Ohio River. It offers a near perspective and you can surely feel the history in the cave. (Doesn't this picture look so much like a female's profile??)
