Weekend snow-tripping

We've had several day trips over the last few weekends, taking advantage of the snow up in the Harz Mountains since Göttingen's hardly gotten any. On the map, Göttingen is circled with yellow and the Harz mountain range is in red.  The Harz are apparently northern Germany's prime ski location.
 
With an inexpensive group ticket that includes bus fare on many local buses, we;'ve headed out to Sankt Andreasberg and to Brocken.


Our first trip to Sankt Andreasberg happened to be on a cold and wet day - it alternated rain and snow - but we were all in good spirits and it didn't bother us much.  We visited an old silver mine called Grube Samson.

 The tour was in German and about all I understood were the various numbers, but I had no idea what they were in reference to except that it took the miners about 90 minutes to climb the ladders out of the mine.

 

reproduced photo of NY canary sellers with German canaries

As you are probably aware, miners often took canaries into the mines to serve as early warning "systems" for toxic gasses.  In Germany canaries were bred intensively and for some time in the 1800s they were shipped to the US  (from what I can gather, though according to this wikipedia article the birds were considered too valuable to go into the mines) .  This explains why there's a canary museum dedicated to the Harz Roller breed at the Samson Mine.

A family makes cages for miners' canaries.

 

I was kind of enchanted by the canaries (they had live ones there, singing up a storm), and their history. It's a very small museum, only 3 or 4 rooms, but it really gave a feel for the era displayed in small details.

(to be continued with the following weekend's excursion...)