To understand what Spruce 1 was, picture a mountain. Then picture engineers using explosives and draglines to take the top off - hundreds of vertical feet of rock, soil, and forest - and pushing the resulting overburden into the headwater streams of the next valley over. What remains is a coal seam, exposed and reachable from above. The technique, called mountaintop removal or surface mining, requires far fewer workers than underground mining and accesses thin coal seams that would not be economic to mine by other means. It also reshapes terrain on a geological scale, buries streams that have run for millions of years, and produces selenium and conductivity pollution that downstream ecosystems do not easily absorb. By the 1990s, mountaintop removal had become the dominant mining method in parts of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.

Arch Coal first proposed Spruce 1 in 1997, originally as a 3,113-acre operation, later trimmed to 2,278. The Army Corps of Engineers, which handles Clean Water Act permits for filling stream channels, took over reviewing the application in 2005. The Corps issued the permit on January 31, 2007. By then, legal action was already winding its way through federal court, and environmental groups had made Spruce 1 a test case for whether the existing regulatory structure could meaningfully restrain mountaintop mining at all. A May 2010 public hearing in West Virginia produced rallies on both sides, with Representative Nick Rahall arguing that EPA intervention would cost the state jobs and environmental advocates arguing that the streams the mine would bury could never be replaced.

In October 2010, Shawn Garvin, the EPA's Mid-Atlantic regional administrator, formally recommended against the project on the grounds that the mine would 'likely have unacceptable adverse effects on wildlife.' On January 13, 2011, the EPA pulled the permit - the first time the agency had ever revoked a Clean Water Act permit for a coal mine that had already been authorized. Arch's subsidiary Mingo Logan Coal sued, arguing that the EPA had no statutory power to retroactively revoke a permit the Corps had issued. The case went to federal district court, then the D.C. Circuit, then back down for a second ruling. Federal judge Amy Berman Jackson initially overturned the EPA in March 2012. The D.C. Circuit reversed her in April 2013. On September 30, 2014, on remand, Judge Berman Jackson ruled in the EPA's favor, allowing the veto to stand.

The Spruce 1 fight mattered not just for the 2,278 acres it covered but as a signal about what federal regulators could and could not do. The D.C. Circuit's 2013 ruling - that the EPA does have the authority to revoke a previously issued permit under the Clean Water Act - changed the calculus for every future mountaintop permit application. Mining companies could no longer treat a Corps permit as the end of the regulatory road. Environmental groups, conversely, gained a precedent that has been cited in subsequent litigation over Appalachian mining. The Spruce 1 site itself remains in roughly the condition it was in when the permit was revoked - some preparatory work had been done, but the mountain was never taken off.

The Spruce 1 site sits in the West Virginia coalfields, where the topography from the air is itself a record of the mining debate. Active and former mountaintop mines appear as flat tan or grey plateaus where mountains used to rise - sometimes reclaimed as grassland or pine plantation, sometimes still raw earth. The surrounding ridges remain heavily forested, in long parallel lines running northeast-southwest. From cruising altitude over Logan and Boone counties, you can see the difference between mined and unmined ridges at a glance. Spruce 1, never built, still looks like a mountain. That is the whole point of the story.