So we were planning on the 10am underground mine tour, but a funny thing happened this morning on the way to Cobalt. We ended up following a bus full of what seemed to be 4th graders, they were waving at us and being quite rambunctious. We were laughing and commented that it would be funny if they were going to the mining museum for the tour. Turns out after following them for about 5 miles, they pulled up in front of the museum and unloaded. We went in and found out all 30 were taking the 10am tour. I asked the guide how busy the 1pm tour was and he said it was empty, needless to say we rebooked for the afternoon tour.

We decided to go through the museum as long as we were there and it held an amazing amount historical items from Cobalt. Unfortunately they are between permanent curators, and the woman who’s helping out wasn’t a whole lot of help with our searching for information on the Schmelers. They have 5000-6000 items in a digital collection, but you can’t search it. She was also sure they had the employment books from the O’Brien mine, but didn’t know where they were and couldn’t find them.🙄

Guess we’ll have to wait until they hire someone full time and then contact them again. The museum was really interesting showing how the town grew when they found silver, and faded when it ran out. They also had an incredible collection of rocks and minerals, most from the area, but some from throughout the world.

We headed out to finish ‘The Heritage Silver Trail’ and see the last of the abandoned mines/mills in the area. It was a perfect day to be out driving dirt roads through the woods and getting out doing short walks through the ruins.

Decided to have lunch on an overlook of Cobalt, it was beautiful,  we could see the whole town and surrounding area.

We headed back to the museum for our tour, only to find out a group of artists were also going on the tour, then four more people showed up to see if they could get on the tour. We laughed that we should have just gone with the kids. Turns out one of the artists worked in the mines out west when he was younger, and had a great deal of knowledge about mines. Overall the tour was great and the guides did a nice job explaining how mining changed over the years.

Then it was time for some more rock/mineral picking at the tailings piles that are scattered throughout the area.  Donna picked a small container full of blueberries for breakfast (Brian ate all his as he picked). We also found the tailings from the O’Brien mine where Donna’s GreatGrandfather worked.

Next it was time for one of Brian’s quirky stops. We drove back south a few miles to Latchford and visited the ‘World’s Shortest Covered Bridge’. It’s only 11’3” long and was built because a local always wanted to build a covered bridge, so he put one above a small creek running through town. When we were in New Brunswick a number of years we visited the ‘World’s Longest Covered Bridge’, so now we’ve seen both end of the spectrum.

Our final stop of the day was at the Northern College in Temiskaming Shores, where they have something called the ‘RockWalk Park’. Back when it was the Haileybury School of Mines, they built this amazing park walk with huge samples of rocks/minerals from all over Canada. It was a beautiful out and a nice walk through the park was a great way to end the day. Looking at a bunch of cool rocks was just a bonus!