340 CONFERENCE ON NATURAL BEAUTY 



the sandy bottoms, the coal miners who followed the highway to 

 the portals of the U.S. Coal and Coke Corp.'s mines, and the oc- 

 casional traveler who wandered into the valley could feast their 

 eyes on a remarkable panorama of unspoiled natural beauty. 



In the last half dozen years the valley has been shattered. A 

 subsidiary of the world's biggest steel corporation decided to strip 

 mine the outcrop coal in the three rich seams that striate the huge 

 hill. Bulldozers, power shovels, and dynamite cut towering "high- 

 walls" into the rugged slopes. The machines and explosives gouged 

 and slashed the mountain for more than 20 winding miles, following 

 the contour of the terrain into the deep coves and around the sharp 

 points. In some places the cuts rose 90 feet straight up as high as 

 a nine-story building. Like monstrous yellow serpents they looped 

 themselves over the land, one near the base of the mountain, another 

 mid-way up, and a third near the top. 



The rubble dislodged from the immense excavations was flung 

 down the hillsides. The trees, the delicate flowers, the ancient ferns, 

 the moss covered rocks the entire ecology of an ancient natural 

 system was buried by avalanches of broken rock and millions of 

 tons of dirt, waste coal, and shale. 



Like huge aprons these spoilbanks extend downward. Each 

 hollow is filled with unstable spoil. A mining engineer has estimated 

 that between 500,000 and 1 million tons of such residue were flung 

 into each of the coves. Predictably, rain pelted the spoil banks and 

 winter freezing and thawing loosened them. In gentle showers and 

 lashing storms the dirt and the stone and the shale moved downward 

 into the river bed. The crystalline creek which had sparkled for 

 millennia turned yellow and turbid. The waterholes disappeared 

 and were replaced with heaps of mud and stones. The banks of 

 the stream turned black. 



Occasionally a mammoth landslide sent avalanches sweeping 

 across a farm or into a home. Much damage was done to the city 

 of Lynch when a landslide piled mud a yard deep in living rooms, on 

 lawns, sidewalks, streets, and public roads. 



U.S. Coal and Coke Corp. sent its bulldozers to dredge the river. 

 They pushed great accumulations of spoil out of the main channel 

 and left it lying in parallel levees on either side. Thus the river, 

 once the cool, pleasant habitat of some of the gamest fresh water fish 

 in the world, became little more than a smooth-bottomed trough 



