The Benson Mines iron operation reduced a mountain to a thirty-foot-deep sand waste

Evidence

The rock hereabouts is rich in iron. There are places where your spinning compass makes you think you’ve wandered into the twilight zone. You can pick up the beach sand with a magnet. Iron mining came early to the Adirondacks and at Benson Mines they tore down the mountain and ground it up. The ore went all over the world, and the mountain came out of a pipe as a slurry of tailings, mine waste laid thirty feet deep. Then the bottom dropped out of the market, jobs left, the mine closed and left behind hundreds of acres of sandy waste, a Sahara in the midst of the wet green Adirondacks. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 215

Categorization

• XREF: Mineral extraction as landscape-shaper — the environmental-justice and land-use thread. Magnetite sand readable in-hand ties land to its read history. — connects to: Legal gaps let Benson Mines escape required reclamation, leaving an unhealable wound — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 217
• SHARE: The magnetic beach sand detail is one to tell a geologist or landscape-ecologist friend.