On The Pegs February 2019 - Volume 4 - Issue 2 | Page 28

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ROCK ON:
Minnesota 2019 National
By Bobby Warner
It’s time to start planning your summer trials trips and all of us in the Upper
Midwest Trials Association (UMTA) are hoping that a trip to Minnesota is on your
schedule this year. We are hosting the third and fourth rounds of the NATC series
on June 1 and 2 at a spectacular area just outside the northern Minnesota town
of Gilbert. I’m the trials master for Round Three on Saturday and Ben Winterer is
trials master for Round Four on Sunday.
If you’ve traveled to Minnesota for previous nationals or world rounds, you are
familiar with the great Spirit Mountain location in Duluth. The new location is
approximately an hour north of Duluth, and with Gilbert being a new location for
nationals, I thought it would be fun to share some background about the area.
The Times They are A-Changin and Gilbert is where the trials action will be
in Minnesota for 2019. Also, fair warning that this is Minnesota and that means
nobody has any idea what the weather will be like in June; it could be snowing,
Buckets of Rain, or 90 degrees and sunny.
Gilbert is located in the area known as the Iron Range in northern Minnesota.
The Iron Range consists of mining districts around Lake Superior in the United
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Vol. 4 Issue 2 - February 2019
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States and Canada. What exactly is the Iron Range, and how did it become what
it is today? To answer that, we have to go back to the gold rush days of the 1800s.
Yes, there was gold discovered in Minnesota, or at least a little bit of it. Lots of
miners moved to northern Minnesota hoping to make their fortunes mining
gold. As it turned out, gold is not what made people rich. It was iron ore.
Minnesota is the largest producer of iron ore and taconite in the United States.
Even though nearly all of the reddish-orange, high-grade natural iron ore in Min-
nesota has been mined, advances in technology have found a use for dark-gray,
lower-grade iron ore, called taconite. The taconite is crushed and processed into
hard, marble-sized pellets. When the Ship Comes In on Lake Superior, the pellets
are loaded and shipped to steel mills around the Great Lakes region. The taco-
nite pellets are then melted in blast furnaces to make steel.
Minnesota currently has seven taconite plants that make the pellets. In the
past, iron ore was mined on three different iron ranges, but only one (the Mesabi
Range) still has active mining today. The steel made from Minnesota iron ore
has obviously been used for many purposes. Probably the most interesting use
in history, though, is steel from Minnesota ore was used extensively in fighting
World War I and World War II. Imagine, one of the modern ships that today carries
pellets from northern Minnesota to the steel mills can haul enough in one trip to
make 10,000 automobiles.
So, what does mining have to do with trials? Good question. The process of
open-pit mining involves blasting away surface rock and debris to access the
valuable iron ore or taconite below. After blasting, the mining companies need
a place to dump all that rock they don’t want. One of the places mined like that
has been transformed into the Iron Range Off-Highway Vehicle State Recreation
Area (OHV) park in Gilbert, where the national is being held. And when I say
dump the rock, I literally mean huge trucks full of rock would dump their loads at
the top of hills where the rocks would tumble Like a Rolling Stone to the bottom.
There are massive, towering hillsides of this rock throughout the 1,864-acre Gil-
bert OHV.
The Minnesota trials club hosts a two-day event at the Gilbert site annually.
Always fun and challenging, there is no such thing as the North Country Blues
when riding the Gilbert Cup. Adding to the fun, a group of our friends from Can-
ada’s SGTR (Sleeping Giant Trials Riders) club make the trip down from Thunder
Bay, Ontario, to ride with us.
Every year for the Gilbert Cup we find more great spots to ride in the sprawling
OHV. There are endless possibilities for sections, and while we’ll be using some of