Mountaintop-removal mining is a category of surface mining used where coal seams run horizontally near the top of a ridge. Operators clear the forest, scrape off the soil, then use explosives to break apart the overlying rock. A dragline excavator - a multi-story piece of equipment with a bucket the size of a school bus - drags the broken rock into adjacent valleys, exposing the coal seam. The coal is shoveled out. The crew moves on to the next ridge. The Hobet mine started in 1974 as a small family operation under Fil Nutter and Granville Lee Linville, using a mix of underground and surface methods. Ashland Oil bought the property in 1977. In 1983, Ashland brought in a dragline, and production roughly doubled. The mountains around the upper Mud River watershed were no longer mountains; they were inventory.

Coal miners are among the most consequential American labor forces, and they have paid for everything they got. In 1993, miners at Hobet joined a selective United Mine Workers strike that pulled together workers across five states. Only thirty percent of U.S. mining was union-protected by then. The Hobet local stayed out from May through December - seven months without paychecks - and ultimately accepted lower wages in exchange for what was called, even by employers, an exceptional health plan. Health care was the point. Coal miners contract black lung at staggering rates, lose their hearing in the dragline pits, and break themselves up over careers measured in decades. Whatever Hobet's union won in 1993 was meant to follow workers into the bodies coal had built. Two decades later, when Patriot Coal declared bankruptcy, those promises were among the first things the company tried to shed.

The Hobet mine sits at the headwaters of the Mud River. More than twenty valley fills - the buried hollows where the old mountain rock now rests - leach a brew of selenium, sulfate, and high-conductivity runoff into the watershed. Even after the mine closed in 2015, those fills kept doing what they do. A 2016 study found that communities living closer to current and former Appalachian coal sites face higher rates of cancer, birth defects, cardiac and pulmonary disease, lower birth weights, and shorter life expectancies. Boone County, the county that sits beneath the Hobet site, has a poverty rate of 23 percent. Lincoln County, just to the west, runs 28 percent. The national rate is 14 percent. In 2012, activists with a group called RAMPS - Radical Action for Mountain People's Survival - shut down the mine in a protest that resulted in twenty arrests. The 2011 documentary The Last Mountain, about a neighboring Boone County operation, captured the regional pattern: poor counties, polluted water, and a coal industry that took the wealth and externalized the cost.

Patriot Coal, which had bought the Hobet mine in 2008, filed Chapter 11 in 2012 and again in 2015. In October 2015, a Virginia bankruptcy court approved the second filing. Patriot's assets and liabilities - including $400 million in worker health-care obligations - were taken on by ERP Compliant Fuels, a subsidiary of the Virginia Conservation Legacy Fund. VCLF promised stream restoration and reforestation under a settlement with the Sierra Club and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. Then-Governor Earl Ray Tomblin proposed in 2016 that the flat Hobet site - all that scraped-bare highland - be redeveloped as a $140 million industrial park. Critics called the plan a long way from reality, citing the persistent water pollution. In 2022, a different proposal emerged: a 250 MW solar farm spread across 3,000 acres of the former mine. It would generate, at scale, the same electricity coal was once dug here to make. The mountains are not coming back. Whatever rises here next will rise on the flat that coal left behind.