This Trip Fits Like a Glove: Michigan's Salty Mitten

Michigan has long been known as the home of Motown and the birthplace of the Model-T automobile.

- L.A. BERRY

In fact, more than 125 million people (equal to the population of France) visited Michigan in 2022, contributing to its ranking 18th out of 50 states when it comes to tourism. But if you think walking the floors where Henry Ford's first 12,000 'horseless carriages' rolled off the production line is historic, it's time to dig a little deeper...

WHAT LIES BENEATH

More than 1,200 feet beneath the streets of Detroit, the north end of Allen Park and most of Melvindale and the Dearborn Rouge complex rests a 20-foot thick bed of Devonian-period salt that holds 100 miles of subterranean tunnels, caves and passageways carved into the salt and extending across more than 1,500 acres.

This, Madame, is not Versailles, but the Detroit Salt Mine. Where salt, as an industry, is older than its automobiles and, as a geologic entity, even older than the dinosaurs.

Although interestingly, while dinosaurs are presumed to have lived here during the Mesozoic Era, no fossils have ever been discovered, as sediment naturally flowing in and out of an ancient Michigan Basin discouraged such remains from fossilizing.

Those receding waves left behind a richer resource still used to this day: rock salt (halite).

THE MICHIGAN BASIN

According to the Detroit Salt Company, LLC, which has operated the state's only rock salt mine since 1997 and has earned Sentinel of Safety Awards from the Mine Health and Safety Administration (MSHA), Michigan's briny beginnings date back 419-359 million years, when the Michigan Basin was an arid patch of the lower peninsula, separated by a land bar from the ocean below the Great Lakes.