Real mining starts at the portal, anyone can dig a hole in the ground

Amen and will do. I need to buy some history books at least.

In the winter when the trees are bare and you can read the land better I've gone out on the town "hill" and looked down over the area and you and see the remains of old mines and settlements around them. Some mines still have their big old shaft equipment - the big tower, old steam parts, and lots of brick buildings remaining. Others are just foundations and scoured areas. Being rural there's no chain link fences to keep people away and the properties remain pretty undisturbed.

I'm a half-mile from a vertical entrance into a very deep mine. There's at least two buildings standing, from a distance one looks very industrial possibly the mill/crushing plant and the other looks like a small admin building like an office. The tailings piles form one side of the road I live on but the mine, on the surface at least, didn't reach this far down the road. I've seen photos from the 1940s and maps and such from the late 1800s. That's how I found the old home site on my property as it had no concrete foundation or fireplace evidence remaining when I bought this place.

As I understand the railroads shutdown in the 1970s and that was just about the last of the big wood/iron days of the UP. All the copper and iron is still down there, and all the wood is still up here.

At the bottom of this mine lies a big, big man. Big John

https://ilmineswiki.web.illinois.edu/wiki/ILMINES

Use the hole as a landfill.  Cities typically have to turn the landfill into some type of hill.  Now they can fill it until it becomes level with the rest of the ground.

The Copper Country Explorer blog used to be a great source; it's mostly defunct but an archived version is accessible here: http://web.archive.org/web/20171028013955/http://coppercountryexplorer.com:80/

The methods used up there were fairly unique and worth reading up on.

There's a decent bit of copper left under the peninsula (S-543 and possibly one of the Centennial mines ring a bell, but it's been years since I did much reading on the district) but the economics of extracting it aren't great. That kind of mining is more challenging to mechanize so it's quite labor intensive for the ore grade. Mass copper also plays hell with drills and doesn't blast properly, from my understanding - tensile strength is way too high.

With that being said, the White Pine and Copperwood deposits are very viable. Site prep for construction began at Copperwood last year. Those are sedimentary-hosted copper-silver orebodies that lend themselves well to mechanized room-and-pillar mining and possibly mechanical cutting with a roadheader or continuous miner. I'd count on an underground development crew beginning work in the UP within five years.

This helps me out as well.  I'm still looking for land, but never really thought about problems with old underground mines.

Sarlacc wants to play!

FIFY.

Original, non-pussified lyrics are always better.

Just part of a field?  We lose entire towns to mines around here.  The key is to strip mine instead, and then build the shit hole town inside of it.