Standing on an aging concrete embankment near the blocked-in entrance to one of the abandoned Greenhill Mine shafts, the slight elevation gives me a view across the metal snow shed coverings over the rails on which coal cars would have run in years past, extracting coal from seams in the earth below. (In the upper left, Turtle Mountain can be seen, a storied peak in the Crowsnest Pass.) For all their simple construction, the snow sheds stand some 60 years after the last coal was brought out of the mine. Still, the forest is gradually but clearly retaking the location. A generation of trees has grown, intermingled with the buildings, and some in their turn have already died. Together with the forces of weather, and completely absent any budgets, press releases, regulations or consultations, the forest is silently reclaiming the once-busy industrial operation that humans left more or less as it was on the day the coal cars stopping rolling.
Slow Reclamation, Blairmore
Royce Howland Photography 