There are amazing things happening in the Soudan Mine State Park. You can tour the "Cadillac of Iron Mines." After the mine tour, I can see why that might be considered a good (luxurious?) place to work for a miner, but it still would be back-breaking, dirty, dark and noisy work.
If you happen to be there at the right time, you can catch the second tour of the Soudan High Energy Physics Lab. This is a surprising place to find near the end of the road. BIG SCIENCE and high tech experiments are happening here.
They are hunting for dark matter. (There is a NOVA podcast here about dark matter.) In another experiment, they are beaming neutrinos at a big detector (pictured) from the Fermi Lab to measure the neutrinos' mass and learn more about their oscillation. Pretty interesting stuff.
If you go, I hope you get a tour guide as enthusiastic and knowledgeable as the guide that showed my group around. Chris really knew his stuff and I enjoyed his talk. He is part of the intern program there. I hope when he gets a "real" job in his future, there is teaching in some part of it. I think he would be a good one.
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