Individual Placement Spotlight Series: Braden Holmes

By Jesse Wolk, Utility Mapping Specialist Individual Placement / AmeriCorps Member placed at Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Division of Parks and Trails

IX: The Librarian

The Individual Placement (I.P.) Spotlight Blog is a series of interviews between Jesse Wolk and his fellow full-term I.P. members. The goal of the series is to highlight their unique positions, projects, and backgrounds while simultaneously reflecting on their service term in the context of the Natural Resources career field in Minnesota. In the ninth edition of the series, The Librarian, the spotlight is shifted to our Drill Core Library Inventory and Curation Specialist – Braden Holmes!

On a world scale, it is hard to overstate Minnesota’s role in the mining industry. From 1930-1935, one half of all extracted iron ore on Earth originated in Minnesota mines. During World War II, approximately 70% of the iron used for the United States’ war efforts came from Minnesota’s Iron Range. After mining all the higher-grade iron ore, the industry had to shift to a less common and lower-grade iron ore, Taconite. With a rise in technology and decrease in supply, the market recessed to where, in 2017, according to the MinnPost, Target now employs more people in downtown Minneapolis than the mining industry does in the entire state.

With that in mind, it is very difficult to accurately describe mining’s role in Minnesota’s current economy. For example, the mining industry still plays a large cultural and economic role in the northeastern part of the state. In 2014, mining made up 16% of that region’s economic output. On a national scale, Minnesota is still the largest producer of iron in the United States. Furthermore, Non-ferrous materials, like Granite, Limestone, Gravel, Clay, and Peat are also mined throughout the state. Overall, this gives Minnesota the fifth largest mining economy in the United States. It’s fair to say that the mining industry is present and powerful, although not the driving force that it once was.

Skipping past the glaring controversy of mining, it is natural to wonder how a mine even starts. I certainly had no idea before writing this essay. (Depending on your perspective, this either makes me the worst or best person to write on that process.) I discovered, after my conversation with Braden Holmes, that like all projects, I should start at a library.

Zooming out real quick, the Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources has an appropriately-named division, Lands and Minerals, that is dedicated to managing the lands and minerals within the state. A decent chunk of that effort is placed in managing permits and leases through the conduction of environmental reviews. A small section of that division is dedicated to managing a unique library.

The Minnesota Drill Core Library is a warehouse of over “3 million linear feet” of archived bedrock and earthen material core samples, “collected during minerals exploration, engineering, and geoscience research programs across the state.” These round cylinders of rock provide a database on the composition of the bedrock throughout the state. The drill cores library mitigates impact to the environment by al

lowing many different users to view these samples instead of having the public take further samples for their research. Typically, anyone can visit the library, which is found in Hibbing. Unfortunately, the library is visit by request only because the shelves that hold many of the drill cores are overloaded and prone to tipping.

Braden Holmes, the Individual Placement’s Drill Corps Library Inventory and Curation specialist, has gotten intimate with fixing this issue. While it seems like a simple task, there are approximately 40,000 boxes that contain drill cores in the library. Additionally, Braden, another half-term I.P. member, and a DNR employee, have been tasked with inventorying the whole library. For context, this means that Braden has been asked to categorize an amount of drill cores that would be approximately equal to 100 Mount Everests if stacked upon each other (see infographic above). To accomplish this seemingly Sisyphean task, Braden has been using Survey123 to record pictures and attributes, has printed off labels for every box, and has recruited other staff at the Land and Minerals Office that he works at for assistance.

A year ago, Braden was in a very different world. That world involved finishing up a Finance degree in his last year of undergrad at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Much like my own academic journey, Braden realized during his last few semesters that what he studied didn’t reflect his interests. By that point, he just wanted to graduate, finish school and get out of Lincoln. Growing up in Pequot Lakes, a small town north of Brainerd, Braden told me that with, “any free time [he] had,” he’d go fishing or hunting. This aspect of his life just wasn’t present in Nebraska, a state with one of the smallest acreages of public land in the union. Roughly a year ago, not only did Braden feel like he didn’t know what to do next, but he wanted to return to his home area. When he found out about this position, it resonated with his passion for the outdoors, and he knew it would give him a year for self-discovery.

Now that he has some space to reflect on his service term, Braden told me that it’s been hard for him to keep momentum in his project. There are so many steps in the project that once people realized the difficulty of the task at hand, effort started to trickle off. To correct this Braden created a progress spreadsheet for people to visualize the change they made when they labeled or inventoried boxes. This helped show people that their effort mattered, which corrected momentum issues and kept progress going.

Braden has also taken advantage of the training budget that the Individual Placement program offers. He has taken two Minnesota Master Naturalist courses and recently attended a symposium hosted by the Aldo Leopold foundation on the past, present, and future of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

The self-discovery piece came to fruition for Braden. He found out that he doesn’t want a self-isolating desk-job and realized that he values the location of his work over his passion for it. While the path forward in Braden’s career is not clear, it seems that he has found ways to narrow down future potential opportunities. For me, Braden’s self-discovery is what an AmeriCorps program has to offer that many other positions don’t. It gives a chance for personal growth and reflection through a low-key professional development opportunity. Even if you don’t love your position, even if it is chaotic, or boring, or dramatic, it offers a chance for growth for people of all backgrounds.

Getting off my high horse and attempting to wrap this one all up, I am truly impressed by Braden’s willingness to jump into this experience. Braden understood that the path he was headed down was not the one he wanted. Hopefully, we can all have that self-awareness when faced with similar decisions in our own lives.

Thanks for reading and catch you in a few weeks!

–  Jesse Wolk