Large tailing piles across the river from Gile Falls are waste rock from mining at the Montreal Mine #5 Shaft. The Montreal Mine’s vertical shaft extended to nearly one mile underground, and horizontal tunnels called levels projected outward from the main shaft into the iron ore body every 300 feet. Rather than mining downward, miners used drills and dynamite to blast up into the ore body above them, creating huge underground caverns called stopes. After each blast, rock that fell from the roof and walls was loaded into ore cars called skips and hauled up the main shaft to the surface. Because stope mining used gravity to help move the rock, it was considered more efficient, but it was also very dangerous, as weakened rock surfaces could collapse unexpectedly and cave-ins were always a threat despite thousands of board feet of timber shoring up the tunnels. At the surface, iron-bearing ore was separated from waste rock and shipped by railroad to the ore docks in Ashland for eastern steel mills, and the tailing piles remain a reminder of the huge amount of rock mined from beneath the ground there.