Ch17 — Coal, Copper & Uranium

Few counties in the American West owe so much of their modern identity to a single set of rocks as Emery does. The coal seams of the Wasatch Plateau, the uranium-rich sandstones of the San Rafael Swell, and the scattered copper occurrences that threaded through the same formations together built the county’s wage economy, drew its workforce, shaped its towns, and produced both its proudest moments and its deepest wounds. This chapter traces the arc of that extractive century and a half — from the first railroad surveys that identified locomotive fuel beneath the plateau, through two mid-century mineral booms, through the disasters that etched Wilberg and Crandall Canyon into the county’s memory, to the present decade in which coal’s dominance is fading and Emery is again in transition.

17.1 The Geologic Setting of Emery’s Mineral Wealth

The three commodities that defined Emery County’s extractive economy — coal, uranium, and copper — are products of separate geologic episodes recorded in different layers of the Colorado Plateau. Coal of commercial thickness and quality occurs in the Blackhawk Formation, a Late Cretaceous coastal-plain deposit laid down along the western margin of the Western Interior Seaway roughly 80 million years ago. Swampy deltas accumulated peat in quiet bays; later burial, compression, and mild heating turned that peat into the bituminous coal seams — the Blind Canyon, Hiawatha, Upper Sunnyside, and Lower Sunnyside seams, among others — that underlie the Wasatch Plateau and the Book Cliffs (USGS Bulletin 628).

Uranium and vanadium, by contrast, concentrated in porous sandstones of the Triassic Chinle Formation (especially the Moss Back Member) and the Jurassic Morrison Formation (especially the Salt Wash Member) on the flanks of the San Rafael Swell. Uranium-bearing groundwater moving through these sandstones encountered reducing zones — most often around carbonized plant debris — where dissolved uranyl ions precipitated as insoluble oxides. The same sandstones carry small amounts of copper, typically as thin green and blue coatings of secondary minerals along the margins of uranium deposits. A smaller, separate suite of copper showings occurs in the Jurassic Navajo Sandstone near the center of the Swell (USGS Bulletin 1239). Taken together, these three geologic systems gave Emery County a triple inheritance: bulk coal for heat and electricity, rare heavy metals for industry and war, and copper as a modest byproduct.

17.2 First Discoveries and the Railroad Era (1870s–1890s)

Emery County’s coal was noticed almost as soon as European Americans entered the country. Surveyors working the eastern slope of the Wasatch Range in the 1870s reported coal outcrops near what would become the town of Emery, but the site’s remoteness, combined with the availability of coal from the already-developed Coalville and Wales mines in the northern Wasatch Front, kept the deposits idle for a generation (“Coal Mining in Utah,” Utah History Encyclopedia).

The catalyst for industrial development came from the railroad. In 1881, a geologist working for the Denver and Rio Grande Western identified a coal deposit suitable for locomotive fuel in the canyons above Price. Castle Gate Mine No. 1 opened in 1886, operated by the Pleasant Valley Coal Company — a railroad subsidiary — and by the late 1880s the D&RGW was hauling coal from Castle Gate, Winter Quarters, and Clear Creek to markets throughout the Intermountain West (Legends of America, “Castle Gate, Utah”). Those early operations lay just across the county line in Carbon County, but the coalfield itself spread south onto the Wasatch Plateau into what would become Emery County territory, and the workforce, infrastructure, and corporate arrangements established in the 1880s set the template for every coal camp that followed.

17.3 The San Rafael Fuel Company and the Emery Coal Camp

Local capital made its first serious attempt at Emery County coal development in the early twentieth century. In 1910, the San Rafael Fuel Company was organized with a capitalization of one million dollars to build a coal camp near the town of Emery. The company had acquired a large tract of patented coal land and had purchased coal rights under surrounding farms and pastures (utahrails.net, “Emery County Coal Mines”). Although the San Rafael operation never rivaled the Carbon County camps in output, it established the pattern of Emery County coal development: county-based corporations, short rail and road hauls to the main line, and mines worked by a mix of local men and recruited immigrants. A scattering of smaller collieries followed through the 1920s and 1930s, producing coal primarily for domestic and regional use [needs additional sources on specific opening/closing dates for Latuda, Consumers, and other smaller Emery-area operations].

17.4 Temple Mountain — Radium, Vanadium, and the First Mineral Boom (1898–1920s)

While coal was rising on the plateau, a very different mineral economy was taking shape on the southeast flank of the San Rafael Swell. Prospectors staked the first claims at Temple Mountain in 1898. Systematic mining began in 1914 — roughly sixteen years after the first claims were staked — but the initial commodity was neither uranium nor vanadium — it was radium. In the years before and after the First World War, radium commanded extraordinary prices for medical and industrial uses, and some of the Temple Mountain ore was shipped to France for the radium experiments of Marie Curie and her laboratory (Wikipedia, “Temple Mountain (Utah)”; Utah History To Go, “Southern Utah’s Uranium Industry”). The mines produced a little vanadium as a secondary product for the growing steel-alloy market.

This first boom was modest, episodic, and tied to global demand. When synthetic radium sources and richer ores elsewhere pushed Temple Mountain’s radium uneconomic in the 1920s, the district quieted. But the claims, the road network, and the basic geologic knowledge all remained, ready for reactivation when the next global demand curve arrived.

17.5 The Uranium Rush (1948–1956)

That next curve arrived with the Cold War. In the summer of 1948, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announced a domestic uranium procurement program designed to free the nation’s weapons and reactor programs from dependence on foreign ore. The AEC offered guaranteed purchase at fixed prices, plus bonuses for new discoveries, and structured the program as a “free enterprise” venture: the government would buy ore but would not itself prospect, mine, or mill. The result was one of the largest peacetime mineral rushes in American history (Utah Historical Society, “The Uranium Boom and Free Enterprise”).

Temple Mountain reopened in 1948 and became one of the major uranium producers on the Colorado Plateau through the mid-1950s. Between 1948 and 1956, the Temple Mountain area alone produced approximately 1,287,000 pounds of U₃O₈ (uranium oxide, or “yellowcake”) and 3,799,000 pounds of V₂O₅ (vanadium pentoxide). A shanty town known as Temple City sprang up at the site, housing miners, geologists, and their families in hastily built frame structures that today survive only as weathered ruins (mindat.org, Temple Mountain Mining District).

The broader rush drew thousands of prospectors to the Four Corners region. By the mid-1950s, nearly six hundred producers across the Colorado Plateau were shipping uranium ore, and industry employment topped eight thousand workers in mines and mills. Charles A. Steen’s 1952 Mi Vida discovery near Moab catalyzed the larger public frenzy — Moab’s population grew from 1,275 in 1950 to 4,682 by 1960 — and although Emery County did not see population growth on that scale, the Swell’s roads, airstrips, and ore-truck staging yards transformed a corner of the county that had been essentially roadless a decade earlier. When the AEC guaranteed-purchase program wound down after 1958, Temple Mountain and most of the smaller Swell districts went quiet almost overnight.

17.6 Castle Valley Coal Comes of Age (1961–1980)

The modern coal economy of Emery County began, improbably, with a home mortgage. In 1961, Shirl and Bessie McArthur mortgaged their house for working capital and organized the Castle Valley Mining Company. The new firm did exploratory drilling and prospect entries at the Wilberg property, which Peabody Coal Company had developed and then closed when postwar coal markets collapsed. By 1970, Castle Valley Mining had nearly one hundred employees and was shipping coal from the reopened Wilberg mine to Nevada Power’s generating plants near Las Vegas (utahrails.net, “Emery County Coal Mines”).

Through the 1970s, a series of larger mines opened or expanded on the Wasatch Plateau, including the Deer Creek Mine — about fifteen miles west of Huntington, covering roughly 18,000 acres of mixed fee, federal, and state leases. Deer Creek employed the longwall mining method in the Blind Canyon Seam and grew to produce more than four million tons of coal per year (Utah Division of Oil, Gas & Mining, Deer Creek file). By 1980, Emery County had surpassed Carbon County to become Utah’s largest coal producer, extracting 6.32 million tons of coal in that year alone (Utah History To Go, “Old King Coal”).

17.7 Power Plants and the Coal-to-Electricity Pipeline

The Castle Valley coal boom of the 1970s was driven not by metallurgical or export demand but by electricity. Utah Power and Light — later folded into PacifiCorp — planned two massive coal-fired generating stations adjacent to the mines, converting the coal into kilowatt-hours before it ever left Emery County.

The Huntington Power Plant sits eight miles west of Huntington at the junction of Deer Creek and Huntington canyons. Its coal came directly from the Deer Creek mine by way of a two-mile conveyor system — one of the shortest fuel-supply chains of any large coal plant in the United States. The Hunter Power Plant, a three-unit station rated at more than 1,577 megawatts, rose on a thousand-acre site just south of Castle Dale. Plans were announced in May 1974 and construction began in January 1976; Unit 1 came online in June 1978, Unit 2 in June 1980, and Unit 3 in mid-1983. A fourth unit was canceled in September 1983 as demand softened. Originally called the Emery Plant, the station was renamed in October 1978 for longtime UP&L president E. Alan Hunter (Global Energy Monitor, “Hunter Power Plant”; Center for Land Use Interpretation).

Hunter’s coal supply — roughly 4,000 tons per day — came primarily from the Wilberg mine in its early years and later from a rotating set of Castle Valley and Wasatch Plateau operations, all hauled along a purpose-built twelve-mile private highway. Together, Hunter and Huntington anchored a local economy in which coal was mined, trucked a few miles, burned on site, and shipped out as electricity to the Wasatch Front and the Intermountain West.

17.8 The Wilberg Mine Fire (December 19, 1984)

On the evening of December 19, 1984, twenty-eight miners and company officials were working deep in the Fifth Right longwall section of the Wilberg Mine, about twelve miles northwest of Orangeville. The crew was nearing the end of a shift in which they hoped to set a twenty-four-hour world production record for a longwall face — a goal the mine’s operators had pursued aggressively for weeks. At approximately 9 p.m., a fire broke out in the First North entry near the gate of the Fifth Right section, cutting off the workers’ escape route.

Twenty-seven people died: eighteen miners and nine company officials, including several who had come underground to witness the record-setting shift. It was the deadliest coal mine fire in Utah history and the worst U.S. mine disaster in twelve years (Utah History Encyclopedia, “Wilberg Mine Fire”; Wikipedia, “Wilberg Mine”). In December 1984, the mine employed 326 miners, with 290 working underground, and production averaged 11,000 tons of coal per day.

The investigation was long and contentious. In the spring of 1987, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) ruled that the fire had been caused by a faulty air compressor allowed to run unattended in a non-fireproofed area. MSHA issued thirty-four citations against Utah Power and Light and Emery Mining Company; nine of the citations identified violations that directly contributed to the disaster. Two monuments in Emery County today honor the victims, including an eight-foot slab of Canadian granite in Orangeville bearing the etched figures of a male and female miner and the names of all twenty-seven dead. Four decades later, Wilberg remains the central historical reference point for coal-mine safety in the Intermountain West.

17.9 Crandall Canyon (August 2007)

A second catastrophe followed almost a generation later. The Crandall Canyon Mine, formerly known as Genwal Mine, was a bituminous underground operation in the far northwestern corner of Emery County. In the early morning hours of August 6, 2007, a seismic event registering 3.9 on the Richter scale was recorded at 2:48 a.m., followed by a call to Emery County authorities reporting a collapse. Six miners — Manuel Sanchez, Kerry Allred, Carlos Payan, Brandon Phillips, Don Erickson, and Luis Hernandez — were trapped. Despite an intensive rescue effort that reached international attention, they were later declared dead and their bodies were never recovered (Wikipedia, “Crandall Canyon Mine”; KSL, “Looking Back at the Crandall Canyon Mine Collapse”).

The rescue effort itself produced a second tragedy. On August 16, 2007, at about 6:30 p.m. MDT, a wall of the rescue tunnel exploded outward, killing three rescue workers — Dale “Bird” Black, 49; Brandon Kimber, 29; and Gary Jensen, 53 — and injuring six others. MSHA’s subsequent investigation concluded that the mine had been “destined to fail.” Genwal Resources had used overly aggressive retreat mining, in which pillars of coal supporting the roof were progressively removed, and had failed to recalibrate its pillar-strength models; an expert panel found that the company had overstated pillar strength by a factor of two. On July 24, 2008, the federal government announced what was then its highest penalty for coal mine safety violations: $1.85 million against Genwal Resources (roughly $2.64 million in 2024 dollars).

Together, Wilberg and Crandall Canyon cost thirty lives and reshaped Emery County’s relationship to the mines that sustained it. The county now maintains memorials to both disasters, and the families of the victims have remained active participants in national mine-safety policy debates.

17.10 Copper and the Secondary Minerals of the Swell

Copper never became a primary industry in Emery County. The commodity appears in the historical record mostly as a byproduct of uranium mining in the San Rafael Swell, and occasionally as the target of small prospect operations in its own right. Secondary copper minerals — azurite, malachite, chalcocite — coated the margins of uranium deposits in the Moss Back Member of the Chinle Formation, and small copper showings occur in the Navajo Sandstone near the center of the Swell (USGS Bulletin 1239).

A catalog of named Swell mines and prospects gives a sense of scale: the Copper Globe Mine, the Green Vein No. 5 Mine in the Green Vein Group on Green Vein Mesa, the Dolly Mine, the Dirty Devil group — a cluster of about fifteen claims covering a butte beside the Muddy River, located in April 1950 — the Little Erma, the Delta, and the Lucky Strike, among others (mindat.org, San Rafael Swell Mining District). Most were short-lived. Production was measured in tons rather than carloads, and none supported a sustained workforce on the scale of the coal mines. Their legacy is visible today mainly in the weathered adits, timbers, and ore chutes scattered across the Swell’s southern flank — and in the tailings piles that reclamation crews are still working to stabilize.

17.11 Labor, Ethnicity, and Community

Emery County’s mines, like those of Carbon County next door, were built by an immigrant workforce. From the 1880s onward, the Denver and Rio Grande Western and the coal companies it controlled hired labor agents to recruit workers from Italy, Greece, Finland, Yugoslavia, Japan, Mexico, and elsewhere. By 1900, laborers from fourteen countries worked the camps at Winter Quarters, Castle Gate, Sunnyside, Clear Creek, and — somewhat later — the smaller Emery County collieries (Utah History To Go, “Old King Coal”; Utah Historical Quarterly vol. 74, 2006).

Northern Italians dominated the early Castle Gate workforce. Greeks began arriving in 1904 to replace striking Italians; their recruitment was handled largely by Leonidas G. Skliris, the so-called “Czar of the Greeks,” who served as labor agent for the Carbon and Emery county mines. Many mines operated as company towns — Castle Gate among them, with Hiawatha in southwestern Carbon County today the last fully functioning example in Utah — in which all housing, stores, schools, and public spaces were owned by the mining company and workers were often paid in scrip redeemable only at company stores. This arrangement concentrated economic power in company hands and made labor organizing exceptionally difficult.

Disasters punctuated the labor history. The 1924 Castle Gate Mine explosion killed 171 men, many of them recent immigrants, and the deaths reverberated through Greek, Italian, and Yugoslav communities across the region. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) pressed repeatedly for recognition through the 1910s and 1920s but was not formally recognized by the coal companies until 1933, after the Wagner Act enshrined the right to organize in federal law. UMWA locals remained active in the Emery County mines through the late twentieth century, and the Wilberg and Crandall Canyon investigations drew heavily on their safety-focused advocacy.

17.12 Decline, Transition, and Legacy (2015–Present)

The twenty-first century has brought a steady decline of Emery County coal. The Deer Creek Mine closed in 2015 after four decades of supplying the Huntington Power Plant; the shutdown cost 182 jobs and ended the direct-conveyor fuel supply that had defined the plant since 1978 (Deseret News, 2014). The Lila Canyon Mine, in the Book Cliffs coalfield south of Horse Canyon, had been Utah’s most productive coal mine in the late 2010s. Developed beginning in 2010 under UtahAmerican Energy (a subsidiary of Murray Energy), Lila Canyon passed in October 2020 to Emery County Coal Resources, a subsidiary of American Consolidated Natural Resources formed out of Murray Energy’s 2019 bankruptcy. A fire ignited in the mine in September 2022; the operation was temporarily sealed on January 15, 2024, and 150 miners lost their jobs (Salt Lake Tribune, December 2023).

The production numbers tell the broader story. In 2020, Emery County produced 712,681 short tons of coal; in 2021, 778,989; in 2022, 762,244; and in 2023, 650,486 — a continuing decline from the 6.32 million-ton peak of 1980 (Utah Geological Survey, Table 2.8). The Hunter Power Plant remains the county’s largest single industrial facility. In April 2024, Rocky Mountain Power and parent company PacifiCorp reinstated Hunter’s original 2042 retirement date after earlier plans to retire the plant sooner, citing developments in the federal Ozone Transport Rule that may allow continued operation for nearly two more decades.

The county’s mineral legacy is therefore both a working industry and a historical record. Coal continues to flow, if at reduced volume, to the Hunter smokestacks and out to the Wasatch Front grid. Uranium, vanadium, and copper operations survive mainly as archaeological sites on the San Rafael Swell, protected within the Emery County Public Land Management Act’s conservation designations. The 2042 Hunter retirement, the future of Lila Canyon, and the pace of reclamation at abandoned uranium mine sites together pose the central economic and environmental questions facing the county for the generation ahead.

Whatever comes next — renewable energy projects, data centers, critical-minerals recovery from legacy tailings, or some combination not yet foreseen — the geologic inheritance of Emery County has already shaped more than a century of human history. The Blackhawk coals, the Chinle and Morrison uranium, and the Navajo copper made this county what it is; they will also, in their closing chapter, shape what it becomes.

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Sources

• USGS Bulletin 628, Geology and Coal Resources of Castle Valley — https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0628/report.pdf
• USGS Bulletin 1239, Geology, Altered Rocks, and Ore Deposits of the San Rafael Swell, Emery County, Utah — https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/1239/report.pdf
• Utah Geological Survey, Table 2.8: Coal Production in Utah by Coal Mine, 2002–2024 — https://geology.utah.gov/docs/statistics/coal2.0/pdf/T2.8.pdf
• BLM Price Field Office, Appendix 25 — Coal Report for Carbon and Emery Counties — https://eplanning.blm.gov/public_projects/lup/67041/83339/99938/Appendix_25-Coal_Report_for_Carbon_and_Emery_Counties.pdf
• Utah History Encyclopedia, “Coal Mining in Utah” — https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/c/COAL_MINING_IN_UTAH.shtml
• Utah History Encyclopedia, “Wilberg Mine Fire” — https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/w/WILBERG_MINE_FIRE.shtml
• Utah History To Go, “Old King Coal — A Long, Colorful Story” — https://historytogo.utah.gov/old-king-coal/
• Utah History To Go, “Utah’s Uranium Boom” — https://historytogo.utah.gov/utahs-uranium-boom/
• Utah Historical Society, “The Uranium Boom and Free Enterprise” — https://history.utah.gov/blog/the-uranium-boom-and-free-enterprise/
• Wikipedia, “Wilberg Mine” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilberg_Mine
• Wikipedia, “Crandall Canyon Mine” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crandall_Canyon_Mine
• Wikipedia, “Temple Mountain (Utah)” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mountain_(Utah)
• utahrails.net, “Emery County Coal Mines” — https://utahrails.net/utahcoal/emery-county-mines.html
• utahrails.net, “Sufco Coal Mine” — https://utahrails.net/utahcoal/sufco.php
• utahrails.net, “Lila Canyon Coal Mine” — https://utahrails.net/utahcoal/lila-canyon.html
• Utah Division of Oil, Gas & Mining, Deer Creek Mine file — https://ogm.utah.gov/coalhydro/DEERCRK.HTM
• Global Energy Monitor, “Hunter Power Plant” — https://www.gem.wiki/Hunter_Power_Plant
• Center for Land Use Interpretation, “Hunter Power Plant” — https://clui.org/ludb/site/hunter-power-plant
• mindat.org, “Temple Mountain Mining District” — https://www.mindat.org/loc-19321.html
• mindat.org, “San Rafael Swell Mining District” — https://www.mindat.org/loc-4146.html
• Deseret News, “PacifiCorp to Close Deer Creek Mine in 2015” — https://www.deseret.com/2014/12/15/20554812/pacificorp-to-close-deer-creek-mine-in-2015/
• Salt Lake Tribune, “Utah’s Lila Canyon Mine Is Idled” (December 2023) — https://www.sltrib.com/news/2023/12/21/utahs-lila-canyon-mine-is-idled/
• KSL, “Looking Back at the Crandall Canyon Mine Collapse 10 Years Later” — https://www.ksl.com/article/45302392/looking-back-at-the-crandall-canyon-mine-collapse-10-years-later
• Utah Foundation, Report 745 (April 2017), Utah’s Coal Counties — https://www.utahfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/rr745.pdf
• Legends of America, “Castle Gate, Utah — Coal Mining Queen” — https://www.legendsofamerica.com/castle-gate-utah/

Proposed Maps and Figures

• Map 17.1 — Emery County coal mines and power plants (Hunter, Huntington, Deer Creek, Wilberg, Crandall Canyon, Lila Canyon) overlaid on the Wasatch Plateau and Book Cliffs coalfields.
• Map 17.2 — San Rafael Swell Mining District showing Temple Mountain, Green Vein Mesa, Dolly, Dirty Devil, Copper Globe, and the 1950s boom-era road network.
• Figure 17.1 — Geologic cross-section of the Wasatch Plateau Blackhawk Formation coal seams (adapted from USGS Bulletin 628).
• Figure 17.2 — Emery County coal production by year, 1900–2024 (Utah Geological Survey data).
• Photograph 17.1 — Hunter Power Plant aerial, three smokestacks visible (USGS Earth Explorer or CLUI).
• Photograph 17.2 — Wilberg memorial in Orangeville (permissions through Deseret News or Emery County).
• Photograph 17.3 — Temple Mountain / Temple City ghost-town structures (Wikimedia Commons or original field photography).

Proposed Tables

• Table 17.1 — Selected Emery County coal mines: name, field, operator, years of operation, peak production.
• Table 17.2 — Wilberg and Crandall Canyon — dates, casualties, cause, federal action taken.
• Table 17.3 — Temple Mountain mining-district cumulative production 1948–1956 (U₃O₈ and V₂O₅).
• Table 17.4 — Emery County annual coal production, 2015–2024 (short tons).

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Research file: research/Ch17_research_notes.md Chapter folder: Part_III_Exploration_Settlement/Ch17_Coal_Copper_Uranium/

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Engagement Features

Did You Know?

• The 1984 Wilberg Mine fire, north of Orangeville, killed twenty-seven miners and was at the time the worst coal-mine disaster in Utah history — until the 2007 Crandall Canyon disaster (immediately adjacent to Emery County) killed six miners and three rescuers, and resulted in a federal penalty of approximately $1.85 million against the operator.
• Temple Mountain, in the southeast corner of Emery County, was one of the most productive uranium-vanadium mining districts in the United States during the early Cold War; the tailings from its 1948–1956 boom still require ongoing federal remediation.
• Emery County coal has fueled the Hunter and Huntington generating plants — the last two large-scale coal-fired power stations in Utah — both scheduled for retirement this decade as the state transitions to natural gas, solar, and other resources (see Ch21).

Family Activity

Power-Plant Tour. Where public tours are offered, schedule a visit to either the Hunter Plant (near Castle Dale) or the Huntington Plant (near Huntington) before their scheduled retirement. Check the operator’s website for current tour availability. Discuss as a family how Emery County’s coal has powered Utah for generations — and what the transition to new energy sources means for local jobs, tax base, and identity.

Youth Challenge — Ghost-Town Geology

Visit Temple City (the ghost town at Temple Mountain) or the remains of Mohrland and Hiawatha (coal-camp ruins straddling the Emery–Carbon county line). At each site, photograph (1) a structural ruin, (2) a piece of rusted mining hardware, (3) a geological feature that explains why mining happened here, and (4) an interpretive sign (if present). Build a family notebook of Emery County’s mining-era ghost towns.

Field Trip

Wilberg Mine Memorial (Orangeville, Emery County). A sober but essential stop on any Emery County mining tour — the memorial lists the names of all twenty-seven miners lost in the 1984 fire. Combine with a visit to the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper (Carbon County, adjacent to Emery) for broader coal-country context.

Photo Assignment

Photograph the cooling towers and stacks of the Huntington or Hunter plant on a cold morning when the plume is most visible. Frame the composition to emphasize the scale of the facility relative to the Castle Valley landscape. Your photograph will become a historical document once both plants are decommissioned.