Life Is A Slow Harold

There’s plenty of mountain still to be removed.

The remains of the surrounding mountains.

http://www.mountainkeeper.org/

My sister and I stopped by this site on our drive from St. Louis to New York a few weeks ago. I called Larry Gibson ahead of time, but he was in the state capital for the day fighting for clean ground water. He told us to go on ahead and visit without him. If anyone is ever in West Virginia, I suggest visiting. It’s out in the woods a bit of a ways, but it’s worth it.

Some background, from his website:

Larry Gibson’s family has lived on or near Kayford Mountain since the late 1700’s. More than 300 relatives are buried in the cemetery on Kayford Mountain. Larry and his family used to live on the lowest lying part of the mountain, and looked “up” to the mountain peaks that surrounded them. Since 1986, the slow motion destruction of Kayford Mountain has been continuous — 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Eighteen years after the “mountain top removal” project began, Larry Gibson now occupies the highest point of land around; he is enveloped by a 12,000 acre pancake in what was previously a mountain range.

Fireflies along the Mississippi.

“Cloudscape” in Millennium Park, Chicago.