Not a Silver Stacking Post
You might remember a couple of weeks ago my wife and I took a trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I wrote a pretty good number of posts about it, so if you missed it, you must have been trying really hard :)
The area we visited is one of the northern-most parts of our state and one nickname for the general area is called "copper country". Feel free to go back and look at my past posts if you want to get into the geography of the region. It involves volcanoes, millennia of heating and cooling of the earth, and cornish miners.
Long story short, there once was a ton of copper up in that area of the state. For the most part it has all been mined out. Good old Google says that all mining of copper in the "UP" ceased in 1969.
On this particular trip, we happened to take our nephew camping with us and one of the activities that we participated in was a tour of one of the now defunct mines. I say defunct, but that isn't entirely accurate. While no commercial mining is happening, Michigan Technical University in nearby Houghton, MI has a mining program and those students have started to mine some of the old adits.
The Qunicy Mine that we visited has a gift shop like most tourist attractions do, and my nephew had some money that was burning a hole in his pocket that he just had to spend. He was looking at all the cheap typical souvenir stuff when we suddenly saw the display above in the far corner of the store.
They had pretty much every shape and form of copper that you could imagine. Blocks like the on you see in the opening photo, all in varying sizes and weights. Raw unformed copper, spheres, 1 oz, 5 oz, 10 oz, 1 pound, 5 pound, they even had a 10 pound "brick" that was selling for like $150 or something like that.
It was a proud uncle moment when I talked my nephew into buying the 5 oz block of copper that you see in the opening photo. I explained to him that it wasn't just a cool souvenir, it was also an investment. His dad is an accountant, so I am sure he will appreciate the lesson taught on this occasion.
It's actually a pretty impressive display if you are into copper at all. I know the #silvergoldstackers community is mostly for silver and gold stacking, but seeing how excited my nephew got about holding some copper, I don't think it is too much of a stretch to expect he will soon own some silver or gold.
Perhaps copper is his "gateway metal" to the wider world of stacking silver and gold. His birthday is coming up in just a couple of months and I think it would be really cool to start buying him some silver bars or coins each year. I am his godfather after all. It would be a special little gift just from me.
It was pretty funny because he was so adamant about not taking it out of the plastic zip bag that it came in. The whole way home (8 hours), you could hear the bag crinkling as he inspected it over and over again. I think it is safe to say the world has a new stacker on it's hands!
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