Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Death of a Mountain: "Instead of excavating the contour of a ridge side, as strip miners did throughout the 1960s and '70s, now entire mountaintops are blasted off, and almost everything that isn't coal is pushed down into the valleys below.... I have come to Lost Mountain because in February Leslie Resources Inc. was granted a state permit to mine this ridgeline. I came here to see what an eastern mountain looks like before, during, and after its transformation into a western desert."

Finalist, reporting, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2006. (Erik Reece, Harper's Magazine)