Copperstrike Mine
Perched precariously on a rocky outcrop in the Larkspur Range, the camp surrounding the entrance to the fledgling Copperstrike Mine is a haphazard collection of tents, makeshift cabins, and low stone structures. Clearly built with urgency rather than care, the camp has a patchwork look, with weathered tarps and canvas flapping in the wind that make Dolgar Stonebeard - the Khadric foreman in charge of the mine - wince every time he walks through it. "That," he grumbles to himself, "is what you get for hiring outside the clans."
To which Borin Coppervein, Dolgar's business partner and the prospector who first found this vein of copper, will take a deep whiff of mountain air, filling his nostrils the sharp scents of freshly churned earth and metallic orb, and smile. "You're right, of course," the optimism coating his voice like thick mead, "but can't you smell that? Its our fortunes."
At the camp's heart, surrounded by a half-dozen individual and generally smoldering cookfires, stands a large communal tent, its canvas patched in muted browns and blues and fraying at the edges from the few short moons of exposure to the elements. The tent serves as the camp's social hub, where the score of miners that work here, paid more on prospects than any actual wage, gather after grueling shifts to eat a tasteless stew and warm themselves around its stove, the canvas providing some protection from the constant wind. Rough-hewn tables are scattered through the tent and a large cauldron of the stew bubble on top of the stove - just don't ask what fills out the thin broth within. A cluster of smaller tents, serving as sleeping quarters for the miners, their entrances invariably closer to individual fires than prudent, the miners opting for warmth over safety.
A pair of single room cabins, both with canvas roofs, sit a bit back from the main tent, one against a cliff that forms the north side of the camp and the second a single stride from the precipice that drops a hundred or more strides straight down along the camp's southern edge. Each cabin is roughly ten feet long and barely five feet wide. Windowless, unpainted, and built from the trunks of a few small birch trees, their white bark still peeling, they serve as quarters for Borin and Dolgar. Each contains their sleeping pads and a small writing desk, built from the same birch as the cabins, Borin's filled with half-written letters to prospective investors and Dolgars with precisely drawn schematics for the mines half-dozen shafts.
The mine entrance itself, supported by rough wooden beams that still ooze sap, cuts into a rocky hill on the eastern side of the camp. A trio of low stone buildings surround it, two holding the carts, rails, ropes, picks, and other mining equipment and the third a newly built smelter, unused and waiting to extract copper from the mine's supposed bounty. A small pile of unrefined ore sits toward the front of the smelting house, but Dolgar has decreed it too pitiful to be worth firing up the furnace.
A Tunnel in Copperstrike Mine
Founding Date
750 AC
Founders
Type
Outpost / Base
Population
25
Location under
Owner/Ruler
Characters in Location
Related Reports (Primary)